I

ntroductIon

One in every four men, women, and children now living on the earth believes that “there is no god except Allah, and

Muḥammad is the Messenger of Allah.” Proclaimed by the tongue and attested in the heart, this testimony (

shahāda

)

makes them Muslims. Muslims believe the Qurʾān is the last revealed Scripture, sent to guide humanity to the Straight Path (

al-ṣirā ṭ al -mustaqīm

), and that the best model to follow is the life of the Prophet Muḥammad, upon him blessings and peace. The Qurʾān and the vast reposito ry of texts dealing w ith the life of the Prophet (Sunna ) are in classical Arabic, as are most of their commentaries. Only about 15 percent of all Muslims today speak Arabic as their mother tongue, and not all of them understand c lassical Arabic. Of the non-Arabic speaking majority , which is rapidly increasing due to population growth and convers ion, it is estimated that only about 8 –1 0 percent have knowledg e of classical A rabic. This means t hat, at best, only 20 percent of all Muslims today understand the language of the primar y sources of their tradition. This disconnection from the primary sources is a recent phenomenon for Muslims. Until the middle of the twentieth

century, a large proportion of literate Muslims had at least a working knowledge of Arabic, even though various colonial

languages had begun in the eighteenth century to replace it as the lingua franca. Th is rupture occurred through a number

of fundamental shifts in the makeup of the Muslim world over the last three centuries, shifts that resulted in the emer

- gence of men and women whose links w ith their intellectual heritage were at best tenuous. The impositio n of new and alien educational systems as part of modernist (often colo nial) projects further intensified t he destruction of traditional Islamic institutions of learning. It is no exaggeration to say that the intellectual, social, political, economic, and cu ltural fabric of

the Muslim world was rewoven during these centuries with new material foreign to its spiritual ethos through a complex

process of social engineering on a grand scale. These radical changes—which have induced a widespread cultural schizophrenia—have exiled most Muslims from

their spiritual and intellectual traditions, primarily by severing their links to the language of revelation and traditional

scholarship. Such widesprea d religious illiteracy has exacerbated (and perhaps precip itated) certain c rises of authority and concomitant regimes of belief and practice. This has in tu rn contributed to the social a nd political instability, som etimes

accompanied by rampant violence, in various regions of

Dār al -Islām

—the vast geographical area across which Islam h as been practiced for centuries and where its intellectual traditions flourished. Similar disruptions have affected small minor- ity communities of Muslims living in ma ny parts of the world.

The Qurʾān and Muslims

Despite these enormous changes, intellectual displacements, and widespread religio us illiteracy, the Qurʾān remains the uncontested source of Muslim beliefs and practices. It is a relatively small text: according to the enumeration of Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī (d. 444/1052) in his

al-Ba yān fī ʿadd āy al-Qu rʾ ān

, it comprises 77,439 words (

kalim

) in 6,216 verses (

āyāt

) arranged

into 114 chapters (

suwar ,

sing.

sūra

). The shortest sura contains 3 verses; the longest, 286. M uslims believe the Qurʾān to be the actual Speech of Allah (

kalām Al lāh

), which cannot properly be translated, having been revealed at a specific place

and time but t ranscending both geography and history. The Descent (

nuzūl

) of the Qurʾān from the Well-Guarded Tablet (

al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ

) was a solemn event that took place within the sac red time of revelation, not in the time of profane histor y

marked by its incessant f low from one moment to the next. Furthermore, Muslims believe that this entrance into huma n history—the “event” of the Qurʾān—completes and culminates the cycle of revelation that began with Ādam, upon him peace. Revealed in a language spoken by human beings, the Q urʾān bowed neither to the conventi ons of Arabic prosody (

naẓm

)

nor to the rhymed prose (

saj ʿ