The Truth of the Qur’an Series

Introduction:

https://beyondtime2017.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/truth-of-the-quran-introduction/

Part 1 – The Qur’an is Beyond a Book:

https://beyondtime2017.wordpress.com/2017/06/01/the-truth-of-the-quran-part-1-beyond-a-book/



Part 2: The Qur’an is Beyond Time

https://beyondtime2017.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/the-truth-of-the-quran-part-2-beyond-ti/

In the name of God most merciful, most compassionate



In Part 1 of this series (all parts are linked in the index above), I began musing on the nature of the Qur’an, showed how it was a Book beyond any other book on this earth, and then elaborated on some of these ideas in Part 2, showing how the Qur’an might in fact also be Beyond Time– that is to say, from a Timeless realm and thus containing elements of Timelessness, some of which I demonstrated (and much more which I mean, insha’Allah, to explore in future entries of this series).

(The nature of that Part 2, in which I briefly introduced from quantum mechanics the theory of dimensions up to the fourth, was somewhat scientific in nature- today’s offering, for better or for worse, will read more like literary analysis).

In summary of these ideas, understanding that we, as human beings are bound in Time, also means understanding that there exists outside of Time a whole realm of things. We can suppose then that God Himself, therefore, might exist on a plane far removed from Time, and, by extension, His Word, the Qur’an, is also something that is not bound by the same constraints as us- and certainly, not by Time.

We have seen this in how tenses are used, apparently at random, with the Qur’an speaking of events as having happened, happening, and being about to happen. A very possible explanation for this, I have demonstrated, is that from the Qur’an’s perspective, Time is not a straight line upon which everything is moving, but rather, just like we can look at a physical line and see all its points, the Divine can view the entirety of Time in the same way- the beginning, the middle and the end all exist at once.

And so before I move on to explore the further implications of these conclusions, there is one more manner of Timelessness that I wish to demonstrate as existing in the Qur’an, and from this I will extract within this entry, God-willing, one more Principle to use in my future discussions.

This Principle is one that I will be calling Simultaneous Totality.

I borrow this term from Norman O. Brown, who describes the style of the Qur’an in the following way:

every Sura is an epiphany and a portent; a warning, “plain tokens that haply we may take heed” (XXIV, 1). The apocalyptic style is totum simul, simultaneous totality; the whole in every part.

Brown further elaborates on this notion by quoting Umberto Eco on the same subject. Eco describes this simultaneous totality (what he calls “The Poetics of the Open Work”) as:

an infinite contained within finiteness: the work therefore has infinite aspects, because each of them, and any moment of it, contains the totality of the work.

G. S. Hodgson also speaks of the Qur’an in a similar way:

almost every element which goes to make up [the Qur’an’s] message is somehow present in any given passage.

This Principle, then, has been proposed and developed by numerous scholars, and is a crucial one to understanding the nature of the Qur’an.

What’s more- it fits in quite sublimely and perfectly with my own work and our developing notion, on this blog, on the Qur’an as being Timeless.

In essence, what this Simultaneous Totality means, is that the entire message the Qur’an can be carried even individual Ayahs, in some subtle way. Even the shortest Ayahs, and the shortest extracts from the Qur’an, in some way contain a greater whole, bearing something from the entire message of the Qur’an even in their briefness.

We could compare this effect to the way DNA code is present in every cell- but also, just like a full collection of cells is required to create the full organism, so too can the Quran not be fully understood through individual Ayahs– the only way of fully understanding the Quran is taking its entire message on board at once.

The fact that something of its full message can be found resonating within each individual part, by no means allows us to consider we can read one Ayah and grasp every nuance of its meaning: rather, we need to do the opposite: we need to consider the entirety of the Qur’an at once.

Paradoxically, this is almost the opposite of Simultaneous Totality: in one sense, the entirety of the Qur’anic message is present in every Ayah, but on the other hand, we cannot hope to fully understand the Qur’an from simply one Ayah, but rather must consider all of them at once.

We might even call these two notions Simultaneous Totality (the whole message in each single Ayah) and Total Simultaneousity (the full meaning only achievable through considering every single Ayah at once). But that would be quite silly, and unnecessarily confusing, so I will instead refer to both these notions, working in harmony, as Simultaneous Totality.

The whole is both found in every part, like the entirety of DNA is found in a single cell- and the full organism can only live and breathe with its full set of cells.

Or indeed, we can look at this notion in another way: the totality of Time, to beings that are not bound by it, can be viewed all at once, as a long line (just like we ourselves can see the start, length and end of a physically drawn line at once). So too can we consider the Qur’an: its fullest, deepest meaning is only fully appreciated by considering every single part of it at once.

In some sense, almost, we can say that the Qur’an is most easily read from a position outside of Time, in which hypothetical space it might be possible to consider in the same instant every single word of it together. Considering our hypothesis that the Qur’an itself comes from a place outside of Time, this might make a great deal of sense.

Of course, we do not have such a luxury as stepping out of Time at will, but the way to understanding the Qur’an more fully might thus involve mimicking this in whatever ways are possible within our current reality: after all, the Qur’an, even if it is from some place Beyond Time, nevertheless was sent to us, and for our guidance, and even if its deepest secrets are hidden from us and visible only to God alone, nevertheless it is a matter of reason to consider that it should still make sense to our human ears, minds and hearts.

Indeed, part of its miracle, therefore, is not only that it comes from a place outside of Time- but also that it breaches into our world and still makes sense to us.

H. Nasr says of the Qur’an:

Many people, especially non-Muslims, who read the Quran for the first time are struck by what appears as a kind of incoherence from the human point of view. It is neither like a highly mystical text nor a manual of Aristotelian logic, though it contains both mysticism and logic. It is not just poetry although it contains the most powerful poetry.

The text of the Quran reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word. It is as if human language were scattered into a thousand fragments like a wave scattered into drops against the rocks at sea. One feels through the shattering effect left upon the language of the Quran, the power of the Divine whence it originated.

The Quran displays human language with all the weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before a power which is infinitely greater than man can imagine.

Human understanding of language, time, order, structure and narrative are all crushed beneath the weight of the Quran: as is only befitting of a book that comes from God almighty Himself.

We are too used to the notion of having access to the very word of God, but considering it in this context reinforces what a hugely meaningful thing it is: it is so grand, majestic, sublime and beyond our imagination, that it causes the framework of our knowledge to buckle beneath its weight: it is barely held by our language, barely perceptible by our senses; were it not for the favour of God in allowing us access to his Words, we would never have been able to grasp a single one of them.

In the Qur’an we can see the very strain that the human language itself suffers from the weight of the words of God And thus, we can see our notion- that the Qur’an is the Timeless being placed within Time- as being a part of this process of the Divine word settling into our world, our human language and our human conceptions.

But still, of course, it makes sense to us- indeed, to those who are used to reading from it, the meanings of the Qur’an can often feel like they enter into our chests floating, more easily than any other meaning is ever attained, and this is part of its miracle.

So then, if the Qur’an is from a place beyond Time- then it makes a great deal of sense to imagine that it is most readily read from some place outside of Time.

But if we cannot step outside of Time, to glance at every single individual part of the Qur’an at once, then what can we do to gain a deeper understanding of it?

Well, we could do what Muslims have been doing since the Qur’an was revealed: learn every word of it by heart. This might not mean that we are able to hold it all at once in the fronts of our minds- but we certainly then would be able to hold it thus in the backs of our minds, and would be able to call upon our memory other Ayahs in order to provide a fuller context to any that we might be reading at once.

And as we consider the meaning of a particular subject, we can thus gather as many Ayahs as we like regarding that certain topic and consider them all together, the full harmony of their joint meanings, rather than taking one by itself and assuming we have the full picture.

This is the closest we can come to reading the Qur’an in the proper way, outside of Time- from within it. And it just happens to be how Muslims have been approaching it for hundreds of years, committing every word of it to memory, and thus in some way storing its entire text in their minds.

Norman O. Brown himself goes on to say:

it does not matter in what order you read the Koran: it is all there all the time; and it is supposed to be all there all the time in your mind or at the back of your mind, memorized and available for appropriate quotation and collage into your conversation or your writing, or your action. Hence the beautiful inconsequentiality of the arrangement of the Suras: from the longest to the shortest.

This then is another way in which we can see how the very structure of the Quran is, in essence, Timeless: it is not a narrative to be read in order, from start to finish, but instead you can open it up at any part and read. It is unlike any other human book or any book known to us- it has no beginning and no end. It is, in this sense, Eternal.

There is, in Timelessness, no real need for words to flow in order. There is no real need for each narrative to be presented individually and to be presented fully when it is.

We see this in terms of rulings for us to follow- they are not fully indexed and present in order, fully explained in discrete chunks- but rather, the rulings of the Qur’an are spread throughout its vast ocean, and to gather them all together is to read and even memorise the entirety of the Qur’an, and to consider it all at once.

We also see it in terms of the stories of the Prophets and their people: they are given again and again, each time given with a new detail, or in a new context, each time being drawn upon in harmony with a new theme that is being discussed. Only in the totality of these references can we grasp the entire story of any particular prophet.

We can only fully understand the tale of each prophet by reading the entirety of the Qur’an and synthesising their details in our heads. We are not presented with a chapter on each individual Prophet and their story, but instead, it all flows together- just like a dream- each part flowing freely into any other part- thus the inconsequentiality of what page you open the book to, to read it: it almost makes no difference. It all belongs everywhere.

A series of Ayahs that tell a story or make a statement do not stand alone, but stories, rulings and statements all have qualifications dotted throughout the Quran, explanations, additions, terms and conditions- or else reinforcements; repetition of the most important parts of the message, repeated over and over again- the worship of God alone, ascribing no partners to him, doing good deeds.

You cannot take an Ayah out of context without having fully in the back of one’s mind the entirety of the Quran- it all exists at once: Simultaneous Totality.

Jeffrey Lang sees the Quran as a Book that

interweaves themes throughout the text, rather than provide several distinct and complete discourses on various topics. In this way it baits the reader, luring him or her into its design, so that its different approaches are allowed to exert their influence frequently and repeatedly. It would be naive of us to expect long uninterrupted dissertations on metaphysics or theology, for such would be understandable to few and of interest and inspiration to far fewer.

Beyond being a reflection of some kind of reality that exists outside of Time, this Simultaneous Totality also functions as a means of making a heavily complicated spiritual, metaphysical message far easier to understand; it is accessible to everyone, and not only those versed in these matters.

It is both a miracle of the Quran’s nature, that its structure hints at an Eternity, but this structure also has a functional role to play: in the Quran the majestic and the mundane but necessary are woven together.

We have therefore seen yet one more implication of what the Timelessness of the Qur’an might mean: in this case, it all exists as one whole narrative, and its totality must be kept entirely in mind in order to fully understand even one of its verses.

This directly mirrors how Time itself might seem to any being that lives outside of it: it is split, to its residents, into a seemingly-endless number of individual instances, but to any who stands outside of it (from a Dimension beyond ours) and looks inside, they will see the totality existing all at once, just as the Qur’an sees the Day of Judgement as taking place in the past, present and future- and just as we might find it easier to read the Qur’an from outside of Time- and God knows best.

This Principle is one that I believe is of great importance in of itself, but also one that I shall be recalling often in my future work on this blog, insha’Allah, as it provides us with clear guidelines on how to attain further meaning than would be possible if we were to look at Ayahs on an individual basis, and thus this Principle will be one of the building blocks for the edifices of knowledge that I mean to build with God’s grace and aid only if He so wills it.

Insha’Allah, I shall follow this post up soon with another that gives a clear example of this Principle in action, which I will demonstrate using an Ayah that both provides possible evidence for this concept, as well as using this same Ayah to demonstrate how this concept can be practically applied.

Before I close this post, I will say that all of which I have spoken is the best degree to which I am able to understand these aspects of the Qur’an, and every proposal I have put forwards is a hypothesis, a possibility- we can never hope to speak with any kind of certainty about any of these topics, and to do so would be injustice and untruth. Instead, I propose these possibilities, knowing full well that God alone knows the truth of anything, and He giveth us from it whatsoever he pleaseth, and so I pray once more, as I did when I opened this blog, that God guide my hand to Truth and away from Untruth, and I close this post by saying that any truth that you will find in it is from God alone, and any untruth and fallibility is from my own shortcomings, and I ask God to guide me to greater knowledge than this.

To see how Simultaneous Totality can be applied in practice, as well as for possible Qur’anic validation for this theory, click here to check out my next post: A Lesson from the Qur’an: Two of Our Principles in Action.

References

N.O. Brown, “The apocalypse of Islam”. Social Text (1983), pp. 155-171.

Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington, 1979), p. 63

M.G.S. Hodgson, “A Comparison of Islam and Christianity as Framework for Religious Life”, Diogenes 3d (1960), p. 62

S. H. Nasr, Ideals and realities of Islam (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 47-48.

J. Lang, Even angels ask: A journey to Islam in America. (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1997).