INTRODUCTION TO THE QURAN

INTRODUCTION TO THE QURAN E VEN before the Prophet Muhammad was chosen by God as His messenger, he used to want to be all alone, so that he could think deeply about life. To do this, he used to retreat to the Cave of Hira on Mount An-Nur on the outskirts of Mecca. One night in the year A.D. 610, the Angel Gabriel appeared to him in this cave. He commanded him: “Read, in the name of your Lord!”. Astonished, the Prophet replied: “I do not know how to read”. The angel repeated these words three times, to which the Prophet gave the same reply. Then the angel said: Read, in the name of your Lord, who created, who created man from a clot. Read! And your Lord is the most bountiful. THE QURAN, 96: 1-3 The joys of this life should be taken as a foretaste of Paradise, and not as an unconditional blessing. So began the revelation of the Holy Quran, in the Prophet’s fortieth year. After memorizing each revelation, he instructed his companions to do likewise. He also called for a scribe (katib al-wahy) to write down every word. There were finally about twenty nine scribes all recording the divine revelations. The entire Quran, which took 23 years to complete, was later memorized by hundreds of the Prophet’s companions during his lifetime. The Earliest Copies of the Quran The Caliph Uthman sent copies of the Quran to far-off places such as Damascus, Kufa and Basra, keeping one for himself and returning the original copy to Hafsa. Two of these very early copies, called Mushaf Uthman, still exist today, one in the Topkapi Museum in Istanbul and the other in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Until the tenth century, Kufic, with its square-shaped letters, was the only script used to write the Quran. Later, in the eleventh century, the master calligrapher, Ibn al- Bawwab, developed new styles of writing based on the rules laid down by Ibn Muqla. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Arabic script continued to improve and often