The Holy Scriptures of the Islamic world, The Koran is the source for instructions on the virtuous life and the divinely inspired revelations of whom Muslims believe was God's last prophet on earth.  Delivered to Muhammad (570 - 632 A.D.) through a series of dictations over the last two decades of his life in both Medina and Mecca, the prophet claimed that Gabriel, the angel of God, had appeared to him on various occasions, sharing with him God's revelations in verses called "ȃya."  Gathered into chapters called "Suras," the revelations were collected and organized only after the prophet's death.  Meant to be sung or recited rather than read, the verses of The Koran represent for many Muslims the pristine example the Arabic language and constitute an exact replica of The Koran that exists in the seventh heaven (text).

Readings

Read the Introduction to The Koran, pp. 1040 - 1042

Read selections from The Koran, pp. 1042 - 1057

Read selections from The Old Testament, pp. 51 - 97

Read selections from The New Testament, pp. 962 - 975

Study Questions

1) Identify familiar Biblical personalities addressed in The Koran.  Contrast their roles and features with those assigned in The Old Testament representations.

2) To and and form whom is The Koran addressed.  To what extent is it meant to be read as a universal scripture?

3) Identify evidence of religious tolerance in The Koran.  Account for how The Koran requires that Christians and Jews are to be treated and served.

4) Reconstruct The Koran's requirements for dealing with unbelievers, with women.  Describe The Koran's  instructions to husbands and wives in marriage.

Key Concepts

The Pious Life
Much of The Koran is devoted to sermons exhorting godly and pious living in peace and service to one another.  Often expressed in lyrical poetic style, the instructions inspire devotion and deep reflection on the part of adherents to Islam.

Legal Authority
Sections of The Koran also define the rules governing various sectors of social, commercial, and familial life, directing adherence to the authorities of the faith.

Legends
Sharing a common source in the traditions of the Hebraic Old Testament, the Muslim Koran is populated with familiar figures like Moses, Abraham, Joseph, Mary, Jonah, and other Biblical characters.  The Koran, however, differs in its interpretations of the roles and character of the personalities.

The Age of Faith
The Koran, like the holy scriptures of other traditions found in the ancient world, reflect a world in which the supernatural and the natural were seen to commingle in time and space, binding the human race in the embrace of allegiances, duties, and definitions directed by gods and their servants.  Religious institutions have been erected in support of almost every sacred text, complete with administrations of priests and teachers to interpret the mysteries of the texts to each successive generation. In the "Age of Faith" that stretched in Western thought from the pre-Socratic philosophers and the mystery sects of the Near East through the Christian Protestant Reformation, religious orders represented the single most stable agencies in an otherwise violent and turbulent socio-political and cultural history.  

The Age of Reason
Challenges to the assumptions of religious philosophy in Western thought by independent and unsanctioned explorations of the natural world through independent slowly began to take their toll on the strict literal interpretations of some religious texts, particularly those with pretensions to physical descriptions of the natural world.  Only in the late 18th century did the "philosophers of the natural sciences" develop systematic standards of inquiry that could effectively answer the demands of faith where demonstrable physical properties could be replicated in answer to the scholastics of religion.