The Qur’an for non-Muslims

The Qur’an for non-Muslims

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1994 1-2 January-February 25-26 The Qur’an for non-Muslims (647)

At the beginning of his article, ‘The Qur’an for Non-Muslims’ (Express Magazine, May 17) Mr. Khushwant Singh has stated that ‘some’ of its prose is as powerful as that of the Old Testament.’ Had the writer made his month-long study of the Qur’an in Arabic, and not through different English translation, he would have appreciated not just ‘some’ of its passages, but its entire text as a superb piece of literature.

He states that he failed to find anything in the Qur’an to the effect that the consumption of alcohol was haram (forbidden). To bear this out he has quoted extensively from passages which deal, not with the wine of this present world, but with the wine of Paradise, which will not ‘dull their senses’ or ‘take away their reason.’ Having certainly confused his readers with this, he omits any mention of the 90th sura of the fifth chapter – ‘Believers, wine and games of chance – are abominations devised by the devil. Avoid them so that you may prosper,’– which surely makes it quite explicit that drinking is forbidden.

It is true that the word haram does not occur regarding wine in the Qur’an, but he confusion arises out of a misunderstanding of the Qur’anic terminology. The words in the verse (5:90), according to Qur’anic usage indicated forbidden things and quite adequately demonstrate that drinking comes into this category. So that there should be no doubt whatsoever on this subject, the Hadith, which is an authentic interpretation of the Qur’an, has specifically applied the word haram to wine.

He later alludes to Muslims’ ‘single-minded devotion to a single book’ (i.e. the Qur’an) in such a way as to suggest a mindless narrowness of purpose on the part of Muslims, supposedly resulting from their reading of the Qur’an. In this connection he relates the story of the burning, by Muslim conquerors, of the great library at Alexandria. Although he dubs this story ‘apocryphal’, he quotes in support of it what the reader is supposed to recognize as an Islamic sentiment: ‘If these other books agree with our Qur’an, they are superfluous and should be destroyed. And if they disagree with it, they are wrong and deserve to be destroyed.

If this had truly been the Muslims attitude, would they, in their heyday, been at such pains to translate books from all over the world into Arabic? Such an attitude could certainly never have existed, for the Qur’an on the contrary, has always encouraged a broadening of the intellect through the spirit of scientific enquiry.

As for the destruction of the great library at Alexandria, this was actually the work of the Romans, about three centuries before Caliph Umar came to govern the country. It was a Christian by the name of Abul Farah Malti, who later falsely attributed this act to the Muslims so that Christians should not be accused of wanton vandalism. The Encyclopedia Britannica (1984) makes it adequately clear that the library at Alexandria ‘continued to exist under Roman rule until the third century A. D.’

Modern historians have gone into considerable detail to confirm these facts. Philip K. Hitti states the case admirably in his History of the Arabs:

The story that by the Caliph’s order Amr for six long months fed the numerous bath furnaces of the city with the volumes of Alexandrian library is one of those tales that make good fiction but bad history. The great Ptolemaic Library was burnt as early as 48 B.C. by Julius Caesar. A later one, referred to as the Daughter Library, was destroyed about A.D. 389 as a result of an edict by the Emperor Theodosius. At the time of the Arab conquest, therefore, no library of importance existed in Alexandria and no contemporary writer ever brought the charge against ‘Amr or ‘Umar’ (p. 166).

The truth is so well–substantiated that this hardly needs further comment.