The Qur'an is considered by Muslims to be the literal word of God, and is the central religious text of Islam. It has also been called, in English, the Koran and, archaically, the Alcoran. The word Qur'an means "recitation". Although the Qur'an is often referred to as a "book", when Muslims speak in the abstract about "the Qur'an", they usually mean the scripture as recited in Arabic rather than the printed work or any translation of it. Muslims believe that the verses of the Qur'an were revealed to Muhammad by God through the Angel Gabriel on numerous occasions between the years 610 and his death on July 6, 632. Modern Western academics generally hold that the Qur'an of today is not very different from the words Muslims believe to have been revealed to Muhammad, as the search for other variants has not yielded any differences of great significance.
The Qur'an occupies a status of primacy in Islamic jurisprudence, and Muslims consider it a definitive source of guidance in to live in accordance to the will of God. To interpret the Qu'ran, Muslims use a form of exegesis known as tafsir.
Muslims believe that the Qur'an is perfect only as revealed in the original Arabic. Translations, they maintain, are the result of human effort, and are necessarily deficient. This deficiency arises from differences in human languages, the human fallibility of translators, and not least because the inspired style found in the original would be lost. Translations are therefore regarded only as commentaries on the Qur'an, or "interpretations of its meaning", not as the Qur'an itself. Almost all modern, printed versions of the Qur'an are parallel text ones, with a vernacular translation facing the original Arabic text. |
The Noble Qur'an.
