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Literature and history.com Bismillahirrahmaniraheem in the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy. Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy, Master of the Day of Judgment, it is you we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those you have blessed, those who incur no anger and have not gone astray. Hello and welcome to Literature and history. Episode 117 the Quran, Part 1 Overview in this program we will first introduce the Quran and learn the basic facts about it, including nomenclature necessary for understanding the book, its size and contents, and its organization and language. Then we'll learn about what are believed to be some of the very earliest verses of the Quran. We'll explore some of the main subjects of the book, including what the Quran says about God and the world, creation and humanity and Judgment Day and heaven and Hell. We'll hear some more Quranic Arabic like we did a moment ago, and then at the end we'll learn a bit about academic scholarship on the Quran. In much of the world today, the Quran has been the most influential book ever written. From a linguistic perspective alone, the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad have shaped the words that many of us use today. Modern Persian was born from the confluence of Quranic Arabic and Middle Persian, and through modern Persian, Arabic words are widely present in Kurdish and Pashto. Islamic regimes put Arabic phraseology in Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi and Sindhi, and elsewhere in Berber, Swahili, Hausa, Malay and Indonesian. Because the Arabic Quran and not vernacular translations of the Quran is used in formal liturgy in Islam, Muslims from all over the world meet and pray together, reciting the same Quranic verses in the same language that Muhammad did starting in the year 610 CE. No words in all of human history have have probably been repeated more often than the Surat al Fatiha, the Quran's first surah, recited by hundreds of millions of Muslims numerous times a day. You just heard it a moment ago in Quranic Arabic and then in the Oxford Halim translation. But Surat al Fatiya is just the first chapter of one of humanity's most beloved books. A book that after a considerable 116 episode wind up and full biography of the Prophet Muhammad, it is now time to put on our podcast's proverbial desk and spend some time with let's start very simple. The Quran is a text of about 77,000 words. This brings it to a length of 446 pages in the popular Oxford World's Classics Halim translation by contrast, a Catholic Bible, one of the longer bibles, has about 780,000 words, making it more than 10 times the length of the Quran. If that helps you picture the book's relative size, There is a reason for the Quran's relative brevity. The Quran is not like the Tanakh or New Testament, an anthology of documents from different sources and time periods, but instead a compilation of revelations from one person over a fairly short period of time. The Quran is thus quite consistent in its language and ideology. The book's name comes from the verb qara', which means to read or to recite, in what is generally understood to be the first verse ever revealed to the Prophet Muhammad he was instructed or recite in the name of your Lord who created or often read in the name of your Lord who created the word Al Quran, then, is most commonly translated as recitation, and the book emphasizes at various junctures that it is to be chanted at a measured cadence or otherwise recited as well as read. The Quran is an Arabic text at numerous junctures. The book itself emphasizes that it's in Arabic, as when God states in one of the we set it down as an Arabic Quran. Many Muslims and non Muslims around the world today read the Quran in translation, just as we are going to study it in English in our podcast. However, it's worth remembering up front here that in Islamic liturgy everywhere, the call to prayer and the daily prayers are all undertaken in classical Arabic and considered invalid in other languages. Though necessity has engendered translations of the Quran in many different languages, the book is also ultimately considered untranslatable. Its words are a melodious combination of Arabic prose and verse and alternating between and intermingling the two. The Quran describes itself as the speech of a noble messenger and not the speech of a poet. The Quran itself then, repeatedly emphasizes the uniqueness and inimitability of its compositional style, a style in Islamic history that has long been considered incomparable and unrivaled. As the book is the word of God. We will hear some more Quranic Arabic a little later in this program. In some verses considered especially beautiful examples of the Quran's prosometric style, the Quran has 114 surahs, or what we can think of as chapters, though the Arabic word surah is better translated as division or section. The second surah, called al baqarah, or the cow, is the longest, about 30 pages in the Oxford Halim Paperback edition. And generally speaking, as you move forward through the Quran, the surahs become shorter and shorter. The surahs are not chronologically organized, and the 114 surahs of the Quran do not constitute 114 separate revelations. Instead, according to Islamic history, parts of the surahs were often revealed to Muhammad at different intervals, such that any given surah, especially longer surahs, can be made up of many different revelations. According to tradition, Muhammad himself specified the organization of the verses within the surahs and then the final order of the 114 surahs themselves. In addition to the names of the surahs as they exist today. Surahs are made up of ayat, or verses, and any given surah might have verses from a number of different revelations that the Prophet had. As a result, the organization of the Quran is neither topical nor chronological. The verses within each surah change subject and direction quickly, and Islamic tafsirs, or commentaries have explored the book's unique organization for a long time. Let's very quickly talk about how the Quran came together. Muhammad's world was predominantly one of oral rather than written literature. And so during Muhammad's 23 years as a prophet, the Quran flourished as a body of memorized recitations. Parts of the Quran were set down piecemeal during Muhammad's life on parchment, sheepskin, and even the broad shoulder blades of camels. According to tradition, although Muhammad never read nor wrote, he worked with numerous companions who wrote down his revelations and let Muhammad proofread them to ensure their accuracy. The first recorder of the Quran was Zayd IBN Tabit, a young Medinan who knew Muhammad personally and was known for his own Quranic recitations. Zayd IBN Tabit, once again according to tradition, collected and collated all the Quranic texts and put them into a single manuscript, giving this manuscript to the first caliph, Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr gave the manuscript to the second caliph, Omar, and after Omar passed away, the manuscript went to Muhammad's widow and Umar's daughter, Hafsa. By this time it was 644 and Muhammad had been gone for 12 years. The third Caliph, Uthman, knew that history was moving fast and he wanted to make sure that the Quran was meticulously preserved for posterity. And so Uthman ordered Zayd IBN Tabit, the Medinan who had organized the manuscript in the first place, to consult with others who had the Quran memorized and then to produce produce a new cross checked codex. This codex, called the Uthmanic Codex, would have been produced sometime around the beginning of Uthman's reign, again644 and not a bad date to remember as it saw the completion of the Quran as it exists today, at least according to Sunni views. The Uthmanic Codex was afterwards sent out to Mecca, Kufa, Basra and Damascus, the epicenters of Islam at that time in 644, and the Caliph Uthman kept a copy for himself in Medina too. Some traditions maintain that Muhammad's son in law, Ali IBN Abi Talib, Islam's fourth Caliph, also set down a copy of the Quran and that other companions of the Prophet collected the verses of the Quran too. However, excepting some small numbering variances, the Quran is a very standard text today across sunnism and shi'. Ism. Again 77,000 words and 114 surahs. And a little later in this sequence, we'll talk about the book's textual history in a bit more detail. Now that we have a basic sense of the size, language, layout and original compilation of the Quran, let's very quickly talk about its contents. The organization of the Quran is again assorted, with each surah changing direction, often as verses from different revelations are situated right next to one another. Though the surahs can be challengingly varied to read through, on the whole, the Quran is still a very ideologically consistent text. The book emphasizes the oneness of God and the need for everyone to revere God as the Creator and sovereign of the universe. The Quran describes a bipartite afterlife in which those who believe in God and act rightly will enjoy the pleasures of heaven, and those who fail to do so will suffer the punishments of hell. One of the names for the Quran in Islamic societies is Al Huda, or the Guide. And as a guide, in addition to outlining the salvific monotheism I've just described, the Quran also includes precepts on how to conduct oneself with probity and truthfulness within human society, placing particular emphasis on individual responsibilities and accountability. The Qur' an follows the prophetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity and has frequent references to Old Testament patriarchs from Adam onward. Considering Jesus as a noble and true prophet in the line of other biblical prophets, we should always remember as we read these frequent references that Muhammad's Mecca was no further from Jerusalem than Constantinople or Rome were from Jerusalem, and that Arabia had long had populations of Jews, Christians, and moreover, that regional Abrahamic narratives would have been familiar to Arabs like Muhammad even a thousand years before the Prophet was born. The voice of the Quran, even in translation, is piercingly beautiful. If you haven't heard it before, let me attempt to describe some of the things that characterize the Quran's style, the surahs are lucent and clear. They proceed with a sort of mellow, patient assuredness. The Quran is often a didactic book, its verses unraveling like the gentle lessons of a sagely teacher. Scholar Mohammed Abdel Halim, in an essay on Quranic Arabic, lists some of the main components of the Quran's style, or balagha, meaning rhetoric. The Quran often tells us that it exists to clarify, and it emphasizes its own clarity, as when one of the surahs says, we sent down to you the book as a clarification of all things. The Quran offers ayat, or signs or evidence in order to support its arguments for the oneness of God, for its moral teachings and other subjects, not simply making assertions, but making assertions and then supporting those assertions with evidence. In addition to its offer to clarify and its presentation of signs or evidence, the Quranic voice also engages the reader with direct and hypothetical questions, asking about the reader's possible doubt, anticipating criticisms and counter arguments, and asking questions to these in return. The Quran's declarative sentences are commonly interspersed with affective sentences, interrogative, exclamatory, and imperative sentences, variously engaging the reader to think, to consider, to remember, and to revere. Even when we read the Quran in English, with the prosometric cadences and the rhyme, consonants and assonance and the multivalent meanings of Quranic Arabic all subtracted, even in English, we can still experience the rhetorical variety of the book. The surahs shift between various sentence types and wind from verse to verse, often addressing the reader directly, using a voice that is present, coaxing, timeless and intimate, as though a serene and certain teacher is there in the room with you, guiding you along. There's plenty more to say about the Quran's singular style, and we'll get to that later on, so that from a very high altitude, is what the Quran is, how it came together, and what it contains. To get a little deeper into the book, we'll need a plan. The Quran, like the psalms in the Old Testament, is not a text that most people read straight through from beginning to end. It's a dense text with a lot of compressed meaning in it. And due to its complexity and miscellaneous organization, readers rarely begin with the first surah and then close the book with 114. As with so many texts I cover in literature and history, I invite you to get a copy and read it in a way that suits you, as the Quran has always been and will always be quite an appealing, approachable book in spite of some of the challenges it presents to new readers. For our purposes in this podcast, we will subdivide our three two hour programs on the Quran into three main Episode 117 overview, Episode 118 ordinances, and Episode 119 origins, the episode to which you are currently listening, now that we've covered some very basic facts about the Quran, will explore the very earliest verses of the Quran and then spend the majority of the rest of the time discussing the book's statements about God and the world, creation and humanity and judgment day and heaven and hell. Though we'll also hear some more Quranic recitation and talk about academic scholarship on the Quran. Toward the end of this show, the present program will not talk about Islamic law in the Quran, as that is the subject of the next show, episode 118 ordinances on the subject of the Quran's Regulatory Framework and later Islamic law. Finally, episode 119 origins will consider the Quran's Abrahamic and Arabian theological heritage because we are about to open one of Earth's great sacred books Let me repeat something I said prior to when we opened the New Testament and before that, prior to when we opened the Tanakh. This is a podcast about cultural history. I don't think anyone has ever been converted or unconverted to anything while listening to it. The approach that we take in this podcast to texts is a historicist one. In other words, we try to study theology, philosophy, literature, and other subjects as part of a greater river of human cultural evolution. Historicism is not the best, nor the only way to study sacred texts. First pioneered in the 19th century by German scholars, historicism attempts to understand books, including sacred literature, within the cultural contexts that engendered them. If you're looking for Quranic instruction that is rooted in traditional Islamic faith, there are plenty of audio programs out there for you. While I've been familiar with the Quran for a long time, my only real strength in presenting the book to you is familiarity with the cultural and theological history that led up to it. And the historicist approach I mentioned a moment ago. Historicism is as biased as anything, but its partisanship more commonly results in reductive guesswork than categorical prejudice. And thus, of all the subjective approaches to sacred texts out there, I hope our podcasts is as inoffensive as possible. Let me make a note up front on translations too, before we jump in. Translating Quranic Arabic is legendarily difficult. Some verses of the book are exegetical war zones. There are multivalent meanings in the original text, and there are a number of 7th century Arabic words that still puzzle scholars today. We have spent literally hundreds of hours reading texts in translation in literature and history, and thus we can readily understand that the best sounding translation and even the clearest translation is not always the most accurate translation. This is the case with the Quran too, because sometimes a contorted and impenetrable verse in English more faithfully represents what the Quran actually says than a verse that sounds luminous and beautiful. To help give you as detailed and faithful an introduction to the Quran as I can, I'm consulting at least four different translations at all times and often looking at notes having to do with the original Arabic. While I will use several translations unless otherwise noted, I'll be quoting from the Mas Abd al Halim translation, first published by Oxford World's Classics in 2004. As always with our podcast, if you want the detailed chapter and verse of anything I quote, it's all available in the link to the episode transcription in your podcast app. The first revelation that the Prophet Muhammad ever had was in a cave at a place called Hira, just outside of Mecca. We discussed the dramatic story behind this revelation. Several episodes ago, Muhammad had, during his 40th year, begun going up to this cave to be alone and to think and worship for stretches of multiple days at a time. After his first revelation, terrified that he might be losing his mind or that he might be misinterpreted as a mere poet, Muhammad considered killing himself. Although the angel Gabriel stopped him. Muhammad returned distraught to his wife Khadijah, asking her to cover him, and it was only after a consultation with Khadijah cousin, a Christian Arab named Waraka, that Muhammad began to believe that this revelation and his vision of the angel Gabriel had been the work of God. The revelation that Muhammad had Now the first five verses of Surat Al Alaq, the 96th Surah of the Quran, is as in the name of your Lord who created he created man from a clinging form. Lord is the most bountiful one who taught by the pen who taught man what he did not know. The word recite there is often translated as read. So for clarification and just because these are such central verses, let's hear that one more time with the imperative read. Instead of recite, Read in the name of your Lord who created he created man From a clinging form read your Lord is the most bountiful one who taught by the pen who taught man what he did not know. We can learn a lot about the Quran from just this Passage first, I just told you a story about this revelation, when and how it happened, using the hadiths of Al Bukhari and Aisha and the biography of Atabari. Linking the Quran to specific biographical moments of Muhammad's life is a major field of Islamic study called Asbab Anuzul. Some verses in the Quran, like the five verses we just heard a couple times, are by general consensus considered to be the products of specific junctures of Muhammad's life life. Others aren't so firmly linked to a single moment. The main point here is that Asbaab Anuzul, or the causes of the revelations, is an important field of study in Islam. The verses we heard a moment ago also exemplify something else. Those five verses that open Surat Al Alaq, the 96th Surah of the Quran, are a revelation for a third time. Again, read, in the name of your Lord who created he created man from a clinging form, read, your Lord is the most bountiful one who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know. Although Surat al Alq is short, and I'll repeat just to be clear, that surahs are chapters or sections of the Quran, the five verses of the revelation that opens this surah are even shorter. The surahs of the Quran work in just this. There is a revelation and another revelation within the same surah, and then another. And often they are associated with one another, and some stretch on for a while. But surahs are not continuous rational disquisitions, nor essays that proceed on and on for many pages. The chapters of the Quran, like the writings of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, are diverse sequences of brief stories, exhortations, pronouncements, oracles and proverbs. Each surah a chronologically unsorted compaction of revelations that Muhammad had between 610 and 632 CE. The words read, in the name of your Lord who created he created man. From a clinging form, read, your Lord is the most bountiful one who taught by the pen who taught man what did not know. These words teach us something else about the Quran, that is that the Quran is intended as an instructive text and one written in the tradition of earlier prophetic history. The Quran is familiar with the narratives of the Tanakh and the New Testament, both of which it considers esteemed and respectable. The Quran presents itself as a capstone to all earlier Abrahamic scriptures. When we learned about the Old Testament in our podcast a hundred episodes ago, we subdivided it into four main parts. The pentateuch the historical books, the wisdom books and the prophetic books. If I had to classify the Quran within these four categories, I would say that the Quran most closely resembles the wisdom literature of particularly the second Temple period, having more of the measured mellow confidence of the wisdom of Solomon or Ecclesiastes than the dour doom saying of Jeremiah. So that takes us through the earliest five verses of the Quran. We only have 6231 to go. Let's hear verses from another very early revelation. These are from Surat al Kalim, or the Pen, and they show God assuring Muhammad that the Prophet was not a madman and telling Muhammad that to be patient. Surat al Kalim says in the Oxford Halim, by the pen, by all they write, you Prophet, are not, by receiving God's grace, a madman. And soon you will see, as will they, which of you is afflicted with madness. There will be gardens of bliss for those who are mindful of God. So Prophet, leave those who reject this revelation to me. We shall lead them on step by step in ways beyond their knowledge. I will allow them more time, for my plan is powerful. These verses as well can teach us plenty about the rest of the Quran. If you are new to the book, one of its most surprising elements is how much of Muhammad's own autobiography is in the Quran. In many surahs, after describing or alluding to specific things happening in Muhammad's life, God instructs Muhammad, chides Muhammad, prods the Prophet, and as we just saw, counsels Muhammad to have forbearance and to be patient toward the skeptical world around him. These largely one sided conversations show Muhammad himself receiving divine wisdom and counsel. Much as in Augustine's Confessions. Augustine records being humbled or inspired by realizations that Augustine had about God. The Quran similarly often shows the divine restrained, gentle voice of God telling the silent Muhammad to be patient and gracious to a world that doesn't always return the favor. This dialogic quality of the book gives it its unique intimacy. It is the voice of God speaking to a man who never in the Quran affects to be anything but a messenger. The Quranic voice also uses a lush variety of sentence constructions and rhetorical strategies. By the pen begins the passage we just heard in an exclamatory sentence, and then another with anaphoric repetition by all they write. The next sentence, a declarative one, addresses Muhammad and by extension the beleaguered believers, telling them, you are not, by receiving God's grace, a madman. And soon you will see, as will they which of you is afflicted with madness? In a rhetorical reversal of rules, finally, we heard the following at the end of that leave those who reject this revelation to me. We shall lead them on step by step. I will allow them more time. There are grammatical shifts there. Leave it to me. We will lead them on. I will allow them more time. These rhetorical shifts in Arabic are called il tifat, and they are a striking part of the Quran's language. The voice of the book is urgent and insistent. Within any given surah, the Quran undertakes restless shifts between sentence types and pronouns. Leave them to me. We shall lead them on. I will allow them. Each shift inviting the reader to listen ever more closely. The early revelations of the Quran often show God speaking gently toward Muhammad and imposing on the Prophet the gravity of Muhammad's revelation. Surat al Muzamil, the 73rd surah, whose title can be translated as Enfolded, addresses Muhammad as Prophet, enfolded in your cloak. And another early revelation begins with you wrapped in your cloak. Arise and give warning. And then tells Muhammad, quote, proclaim the greatness of your Lord. Cleanse yourself. Keep away from all filth. Do not weaken feeling overwhelmed. Be steadfast in your Lord's cause. These reassuring verses have a universality to them, telling all believers to take heart and be calm. As Muhammad himself faced persecution and opposition too. Not all of the early revelations merely counseled Muhammad to keep calm and carry on. Others told him that those who were set against him would suffer divine retribution. Surat al Masad, or the palm fiber, is an oracle against Muhammad's half uncle, Abu Lahab, which reads, may the hands of Abu Lahab be ruined. May he be ruined too. Neither his wealth nor his gains will help him. He will burn in the flaming fire, and so will his wife, the firewood carrier with a palm fiber rope around her neck. It is a grim vision of Abu Lahab's coming fall. But in the various 9th century biographies of Muhammad, Abu Lahab appears as a particularly vicious opponent of the earliest Muslims. Another early revelation, Surat al Taqir, or rolling up, is a complete theological statement containing much of what we've heard thus far from these early Meccan surahs. An assurance that God's justice is coming, though a much gentler assurance than the one we just heard. Together with an exhortation to believe. Surah taqir, the Quran's 81st surah, is also breathtakingly beautiful. Let's hear it this time in the Penguin. Tarif Khalidi, prosometric in the name of God, merciful to all, compassionate to each. When the sun is rolled up, when the stars are cast adrift, when the mountains are wiped out, when pregnant camels are left unattended, when wild animals are herded together, when seas are filled to overflowing, when souls are paired together, when the newborn girl buried alive is asked for what crime she was murdered, when scrolls are unfolded, when the sky is scraped away, when hellfire is kindled, when the garden is drawn near, Then each soul will know what it has readied. No, indeed, I swear by the planets ascending or receding. By the night, night when it slinks away, by the morning when it respires. This is the speech of a noble envoy. He is a figure of great power, in high esteem, with the Lord of the Throne obeyed in heaven, worthy of trust. Your companion is not possessed. He saw him on the open horizon. Nor does he hold back what comes from the unseen. Nor is this the speech of an accursed demon. So where are you heading? This is but a remembrance to mankind, to any of you who wish to follow the straight path. And you cannot do so unless God wishes. Lord of the worlds. The revelation we just heard is an apocalyptic vision, like so many in the annals of Abrahamic prophecy. By the time Muhammad was born, apocalyptic oracles were more than a thousand years old, their general visions of pleasure for the pious and suffering for sinners unspooling over the thousands of pages of prophets that stretch from Isaiah to John of Patmos, the author of the Christian Book of Revelation. And after these apocryphal apocalypse books, and surely hundreds of lost visions of the end of the world. What makes Surat al Taqir remarkable in the ancient tradition of apocalyptic visions is the delicate balance of its imagery. Oceans seethe and the stars come loose from their orbits, but animals are herded and a baby girl killed by her parents in the ignorance before Islam. For being born female is granted divine justice. The sun is stowed away, but people are justly sorted. Hell blazes, but heaven is brought near and daybreak breathes softly. Just as Jahili Arabic poets like Antara Ibn Shaddad performatively acknowledged their own virtuosity. The Surah we just heard attests this is the speech of a noble envoy. The very deftness and beauty of the passage's language presented as evidence of the revelation's divine origins. Let's pause for a moment and reflect on what we've learned so far from these very early Meccan revelations. The verses that we've just looked at were from Surahs 96, 68, 73, 74, 111, and 81. And to reiterate, these verses are scattered throughout later parts of the Quran, which is not organized according to the chronological order of Muhammad's revelations. The verses that we've looked at so far have given us an idea of the often dialogic quality of the Quran. The surahs often show God speaking directly to Muhammad to offer the Prophet counsel and directives at specific junctures. The verses that we just looked at offered an introductory sense of the Quran's linguistic richness, its variety in sentence structure, its rhetorical shifts, its deft and carefully balanced imagery and and moreover, the power of the Quranic voice, its capacity to be urgent and insistent, but also sympathetic, warm and close at hand. The verses that we just heard also give us some sense of the Quran's Abrahamic heritage, including Abrahamic eschatology. Another very early revelation is one that we've already heard, the Surah, which opened the present podcast episode. The first Surah of the Quran is a short chapter called Surat al Fatiha, which is often simply translated as the Opening. Let's hear it again, this time in the N.J. dawood translation, first published by Penguin in 1956. To be clear, if you open a Quran to page one, this is what you in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe, the Merciful, the Compassionate, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment, you alone we worship, and to you alone we turn for help. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have provoked your ire, nor of those who have lost their way. Surat al Fatihah, or the opening, is something that hundreds of millions of believers recite every day. Although the recitation is of course in Quranic Arabic, Surat al Fatiha is generally considered to be one of the earliest revelations that Muhammad had the first words of the first Surah of the Quran in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This verse is called the Basmala or the Tasmiyya, and it's printed at the top of every single surah in the Quran, save just one. If we skip skip forward over hundreds of subsequent verses in the Quran, carefully assigned to different moments of Muhammad's life and his prophetic career, we arrive at what is generally considered the final revelation of Muhammad, a verse that he offered to believers during the farewell pilgrimage of 632 or just after. According to Sunni and Shia interpretations, the verse the third within Surat al Maidah, or the feast. The Quran's fifth surah offers the following assurance. Today the disbelievers have lost all hope that you will give up your religion. Do not fear them, fear me. Today I have perfected your religion for you, completed my blessing upon you, and chosen as your religion Islam. The word Islam here, which is generally translated as submission to the will of God, is used a few times throughout the Quran alongside the word Muslims or Al Muslim, one who submits to God throughout the Quran. Islam and Muslims are general terms for the primordial, true monotheistic religion and its adherents. The religion of Abraham that had always been nascent in ancient Arabia and that Hanifs, Jews and Christians all knew in part. In the language of this final revelation, though, the word Islam seems to more specifically describe the religion revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, rather than generically submission to God in the broader sense. It is really appropriate then, that the final revelation of the Prophet Muhammad contains the word Islam in the sense that we now understand it today. Other revelations considered to be the last or among the last verses ever revealed to Muhammad exhibit a similar quality of finality and universality. A verse toward the end of Surat al Baqarah, the lengthy second surah, tells, beware of a day when you will be returned to God. Every soul will be paid in full for what it has earned, and no one will be wronged. Another late revelation tells believers that if they are ostracized, they should say, God suffices me. There is no God, but He. In him do I trust, and he is the Lord of the mighty throne. In what is generally understood as the last complete surah ever revealed to Muhammad, a surah revealed during the conquest of Mecca, there is a clear tone of victory. Surah al Nasr, or help, the Quran's 110th Surah says, when God's help comes and he opens up your way, Prophet, when you see people embracing God's faith in crowds, celebrate the praise of your Lord and ask his forgiveness, he is always ready to accept repentance. There is, then, an outline of the long and decorated career of Muhammad that zigzags through the Quran's many verses. From being the frightened recipient of divine words huddled beneath his cloak, Muhammad in the final revelations is triumphant, offering verses again and again that seem to contain the pith of Islamic teaching in just a sentence or two. So to move forward, one of the ways to understand the Quran is something we just did, to study it as a sequence of revelations that Muhammad had between 6, 10. In 632, Muhammad's wife Aisha, once asked about Muhammad's character, replies in a Hadith quote, do you not read the Quran? His character was the Quran. Indeed, as we've seen so far and will continue to see, the personality of the Prophet, as evident in the early biographies of Ibn Isaq and Al Waqiri, is evident in the pages of the Quran. The Quranic voice is wise, practical, patient, persuasive and eloquent. Precisely as we see Muhammad in so many 9th century biographies. It is important to understand some of the biographical and historical origins of the many verses and surahs of the Quran. Hence our six hours of programs on the life of the Prophet leading up to this one. This is the point in the episode at which I need to make some organizational decisions. The longer surahs of the Quran do not offer sustained arguments or narratives that I can go through and summarize as cohesive units. The shorter surahs are frequently single revelations, each incandescent and rich with meaning, but also each its own theological and philosophical statement. You've just heard a general introduction to the Quran's form and contents and then learned about some of the very earliest and very latest revelations that Muhammad had. Rather than continuing to tack Quranic verses onto the timeline of Muhammad's life, and because this is an introductory episode, I think the best way for us to continue will be to hear an overview of some of the major topics recurrently covered in the Quran, along with representative verses on each major topic. The major topics to be covered in the remainder of this episode will be what the Quran says about God, creation, humanity and jannat and Jahannam, or heaven and hell. These are among the very most important subjects in the book. Additionally, we will once again have two more programs on the Quran after this one, the first on Islamic law in the Quran and the second on the Quran's theological heritage. While we will only hear a small sampling of Quranic verses in the remainder of this episode, again on God, creation, humanity, and heaven and hell. By the time we're through, you should have a basic sense of some of the book's most important teachings. So let's begin by exploring the ways in which the Quran describes and does not describe God. There is a wondrousness in the way that the Quran describes God that is well established by the end of the Quran's second surah. The Quran, as mentioned earlier, often cites signs or proofs or in Arabic, ayat, as overwhelming evidence of God's presence. The Quran, at Some of its most soaring moments simply cites some of the miracles of nature as evidence for the majesty of God, as in these passages from Surat al Baqarah, or the cow again, the Quran's second marvelous creator of the heavens and the earth. When he decrees a matter, he merely says to it be. And it is the ignorant say, if only God would speak to us, if only a sign would descend upon us. This too was said by past generations word for word. Their minds are much alike. But we have made clear these signs to a people of firm faith. It is he who made the earth a bed for you, the sky a canopy, who causes water to descend from the sky with which he brings forth fruits as sustenance for you. Do not therefore set up any equals to God when you know better. If you doubt what we revealed to our servant, bring forth one Surah, like in the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the cycle of night and day, in ships that plow the sea to mankind's benefit, in what God causes to descend from the sky of water, giving life to the earth hitherto dead, and peopling it with all manner of crawling creatures in varying the winds and clouds which run their course between sky and earth. In these are signs for people who reflect. That was the tariff Khalidi translation published by Penguin in 2008. What we hear in those passages which are in both prose and verse in the original Arabic, are descriptions of the bounties and beauties of earth as tangible evidence for divine creation. The Surah asks why people are waiting around for a sign to believe when right there in front of them there is rain and changing winds, plants springing up from the dead earth and the great cadences of clouds and night and day, and ships sailing through far off seas. These verses are striking within the annals of Abrahamic theology, Judaism and Christianity, along with their silent partner Platonism, and have had a sometimes squeamish relationship with the material world. New Testament epistles often dismiss earth as a grubby prelude to heaven, and with the exception of Psalm 65, into the erotic metaphors of the Song of Songs, the Tanakh says very little about nature. For these reasons, celebratory passages about the earth's wondrousness in Surat al Baqarah and other chapters are a unique part of Islamic history, having inspired the works of of early Islamic science as well as exegesis on the Quran centered on the natural sciences. If you come to Surat al Baqarah, the second chapter of the Quran as we are fairly well versed in the Bible. The verses praising earth as evidence of the Divine are one of the Surah's most distinctive features. The Quran then describes God as manifestly present within the wonders all around us. The tacit point in the passage you just heard is the Quran's often repeated assurance that God has power over everything. Control of the heavens and earth belongs to God, and that whenever God wants something to happen, he says only be. And it is each of these phrases used numerous times throughout the book. The Quran calls God the wisest of all judges and says that God, omnipresent and omniscient, is the force that makes people laugh as well as weep. Numerous surahs marvel on the infinite and otherwise indescribable wisdom of God. A verse in Surat al Anh, the sixth surah reads, he has the keys to the unseen. No one knows them but Him. He knows all that is in the land and sea. No leaf falls without his knowledge, nor is there a single grain in the darkness of the earth or anything fresh or withered that is not written in a clear record. This divine knowledge, of course, extends to the sphere of human activity and the deeds of every person. And a very frequently repeated epithet is him who knows what is seen and unseen and elsewhere. God knows all that is hidden in the heavens and earth. He knows the thoughts contained in the heart. Finally, in a famous description, the Quran calls God the first and the Last, the outer and the Inner, he who has knowledge of all things. In summation, then, omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience are qualities thoroughly applied to God throughout the Quran. In what is likely the single most well known verse of the entire Quran, Ayat al Kursi, or the throne verse. Adorning thousands of mosques and homes all over the world, the Quran states, God. There is no God but He, the Living, the Self subsisting. Neither slumber overtakes him nor sleep unto him belongs Whatsoever is in the heavens and to whatsoever is on the earth. Who is there who may intercede with him, save by his leave? He knows that which is before them and that which is behind them, and they encompass nothing of his knowledge save what he wills. His pedestal embraces the heavens and the earth protecting them tires him not, and he is exalted, the magnificent. That was from the Harper, one study Quran translation published in 2015. In hearing these verses and epithets, it's important to pause for a moment here and emphasize that if the entire Quran has a main point, that point is the stupendous oneness and grandeur of God. That's the core of the book. It is an inspirational book offering readers an anchor of reassurance that a beneficent protector is there who is present on the earth, in the stars, and in everything around us. The Quran covers many topics. We're only an hour or so into the seven that we'll spend on it in our podcast. But again, the heart of the book is its many revelations about the oneness, omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence of God. While the Quran often describes what God is, the Quran also describes what God is not. Surat Anisa, the fourth Surah, proclaims that Jesus, son of Mary, was nothing more than a messenger of God, his word directed to Mary and a spirit from him. So believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of a trinity. God is only one God. He is far above having a son. Elsewhere, considering Christianity and perhaps other religions, the Quran states that God has neither a wife nor a son, and in one of the final surahs he begot no one, nor was he begotten. While the Quran's insistence that God has no son is at odds with Christian doctrine for extremely obvious reasons, Christianity has no issue with the Quran's similar insistence that God has no daughters. The Quran describes the pagan Arabian goddesses Al Lat and Al Aza and the third other one Manat, and the book remarks with incredulity at numerous junctures that pagan Arabs envision God as having only daughters while they themselves, the patriarchal Arabs, in other words, play stock in having sons. God in the Quran, then, is emphatically singular, having neither partners nor children. In addition to being sovereign and singular, the Quranic voice describes God as fundamentally just and good. The Quran states that God does not will injustice for his creatures and that he does not wrong anyone. By as much as the weight of a speck of dust, he doubles any good deed. Numerous other verses emphasize that God is never unjust, perhaps culminating in an avowal in Surat al Jathiya, the 45th Surah, that God created the heavens and earth for a true purpose, to reward each soul according to its deeds. They will not be wronged. The Quran's view of earth is of a place governed by an ultimate cosmic justice, with one verse emphasizing that God will weigh the deeds of believers down to the weight of a mustard seed on the day of judgment. Judgment day and the administration of divine justice are pervasive topics in the Quran, which emphasizes that God will mete out justice to all according to their deeds. Before we get to judgment day or the end, so to speak, let's actually go back to the beginning and explore the basics of what the Quran has to say about God's creation of the world World and the Creation of humanity the Quran's cosmogony or theory regarding the origin of the universe is a creationist account of the beginning of things similar to the one we find in the Book of Genesis. Perhaps most representatively, Surat Al Araf, the seventh Surah describes God who created the heavens and earth in six days, then established Himself on the throne. He created the sun, moon and stars to be subservient to his command. All creation and command belong to Him. Other surahs also describe this same six day creation and also emphasize how God became sovereign over his creation after it took place with another surah having a familiar image from he created the heavens and the earth and his throne was on water. The longest account of creation in the Quran is in Surat Fusilat, the 41st Surah, and this account describes the creation of the earth and heavens as subdivided into first two days and then four days, and then then an additional two days. Surat Fusilat, whose title can be translated as made Clear, states that God created the earth in two days. He who is Lord of the worlds. Above the earth he erected towering mountains and he blessed it and appraised its provisions in four days in equal measure to those who need them. Then he ordained seven heavens in two days and inspired each heaven with its disposition. And we adorned the lowest heaven with lanterns and for protection. Such was the devising of the Almighty. All knowing. That was the Penguin Tarif Khalidi translation. Elsewhere, the Qur' an tells us that God brings day from night and night from day. Striking verses marvel at God's creation of the sky and earth and the livestock that serves humanity and God's creation of other things you know nothing about emphasizing that the palpable world of human experience is only a small portion of the divine. To repeat something that we learned earlier, the Quran doesn't simply see the world as a drab stage on which the drama of human ethical behavior will be carried out. The Quran sees the world and universe as gorgeous churning systems full of life and color that are themselves palpable proofs or signs of God's presence. For instance, in Surat Fatir or the Creator, the 35th Surah, the Quran says in the Oxford Haleem translation, praise be to God, Creator of the heavens and earth. It is God who sends forth the winds. They Raise up to the clouds. The two bodies of water are not alike. One is palpable, sweet and pleasant to drink, the other salty and bitter. Yet from each you eat fresh fish and extract ornaments to wear. And in each you see the ships ploughing their course. Have you not seen how God sends water down from the sky and that we produce with it fruits of varied colors, that there are in the mountains, layers of white and red, of various hues and jet black, that there are various colors among human beings, wild animals and livestock too. As you can see there. As in earlier verses I quoted, the Quran's creationism is part of its broader sense that the magnificence of the world is a sign of the oneness of God. There is a repeated emphasis in the Quran's many accolades of the created universe, of the harmony that governs the environments that humans experience. The sun and moon, the book tells us, are beautiful in separate ways, and both help demarcate the orderly passage of time. The falling meteorites, the constellations of the zodiac visible to everyone to see, and the star Sirius are all within the governance of God. So too are the many natural systems at work around us, including pollination, tornadoes, mountains and rivers. And among all the creations of God described in the Koran, the Quran itself is often cited as a divine production. A rich verse of the book states that if all the trees on earth were pens, and all the seas with seven more seas besides were ink, still God's words would not run out. Revere the world, the Quran teaches its reader, but also appreciate the Quran itself as a guide and index for the world and the many things in it. In the Quran, as in Judaism and Christianity, one of God's many creations is humanity. Let's discuss the Quran's account of humanity's creation. The Quran variously states that God created the first human from, quote, dried clay formed from dark mud or from dust and then from a drop of fluid. The Quran frequently emphasizes that God didn't just create the first humans and then let biological life go on its way. The Quran tells us that God continues to be present in the ongoing creation of human life following the initial creation. For instance, the book states that God created you, from dust, then from a drop of fluid, then from a tiny clinging form, then he brought you forth as infants, then he allowed you to reach maturity. The creation of humans in the Koran, then, is a continuously generative process, as God is part of the miraculous gestation of every person. Just as the book of Genesis does. The Quran emphasizes that God created humanity as male and female, and in corresponding pairs. The surahs emphasize that from the union of male and female come not only children and grandchildren, but also unions between people that are characterized by he ordained love and kindness between you. As with natural wonders like rain and growing plants, the Qur' an frequently cites the biological perpetuation of human life and the everyday miracles of love and reproduction as further marvelous signs of God's presence and God's beneficence. The Quran, then contains these general accounts of humanity's that we were made from clay or dust into pairs to produce more of us, and that God is a part of every epoch of humanity's generation, past, present and future. But the Quran also contains the familiar, mostly biblical account of Adam and creation. Surat al Baqarah, the Quran's second surah, tells us in the Dawood translation. And when we said to the angels, prostrate yourselves before Adam, they all prostrated themselves except Satan, who in his pride refused and became an unbeliever. We said, adam, dwell with your spouse in paradise, and both of you eat of its fruits to your heart's content, whatever you will, but never approach this tree, or you shall both become transgressors. But Satan lured them thence and brought about their banishment. Get ye down, we said, and be enemies to each other. Other, the earth will provide for you an abode and comforts for a time. What follows in the second surah of the Quran and many other surahs is an account of how God offered prophetic messages to humanity, from Adam to Moses on down to Muhammad himself. I actually want to talk about the Abrahamic and Arabian heritage of the Quran extensively in the third program in this trio of episodes on the Quran. So let's stick with the Quran itself for the the moment. We've just heard the Quranic account of creation and the book's sense that the created world is splendorous and multifarious. We've heard the Quranic account of the creation of humanity, an account that tells us that humanity was created from raw, earthy materials by God, who continues to be a part of the gestation of each new human being. And we've just been introduced to the Quran's adoption of the Genesis creation story. What I want to do now is to discuss the Quran's view of humanity. In other words, God creates the earth and humanity in the Quran. But what sorts of creatures are human beings in the Quran? Are we benevolent, just creatures? Or does the Quran take a more Augustinian approach and picture us as beings flawed by Adam's original sin. The short answer is somewhere in between. First of all, the Quran, just as it venerates the many miracles of the natural world, also cites the multiplicity of humanity as a sign of God's sovereignty, as the Quranic voice puts and one of his signs is the diversity of your languages and colors. Multiform as humanity is, though, the Quran also at one point emphasizes that people are just one small part of the cosmos. The book emphasizes that the creation of the heavens and earth is greater by far than the creation of mankind, though most people do not know it. Quite a nice verse in my opinion, that moves away from the homocentricity so common in salvific religions. The Quran also describes humanity as neither good nor evil, instead stating that man was truly created anxious, he is fretful when misfortune touches him, but tight fisted when good fortune comes his way. A different surah offers a more optimistic verse about human nature, saying so profit as a man of pure fear. Faith, stand firm and true in your devotion to the religion. This is the natural disposition God instilled in mankind. There is no altering God's creation elsewhere, though the Qur' an we created man in the finest state, then reduced him to the lowest of the low. And at several junctures the book calls humanity surely ungrateful, spending large portions of numerous surahs lamenting that in earlier history people ignored the revelations of God's prophets. The Quran's sense of human nature then largely comes from and is consonant with Christian and Jewish traditions. We were created by a gracious and benevolent deity and given copious furnishings on earth to make us comfortable. And yet, in spite of the palpable evidence around us, we all too often refuse to believe in God or respect the validity of prophetic messages. So that takes us through two massively important subjects in the its descriptions of God and divine nature, and then its account of how earth was created and the nature of humanity. While I hope I've given you a sense of what the Quran says on these central topics, I also hope that the plentiful quotes you've heard from the Quran have offered some impression of what the book sounds like. Its voice is patient, measured and pedagogical. Its signs or ayat, whether rain or oceans or human gestation, are presented as self evident miracles and evidence of the omnipresent ministrations of God. While the book's voice is calm and calculated, the Quran's sentences unfold in nearly constant structural variety, switching from imperatives to declaratives to interrogatives The Quranic voice sometimes speaks in the third person, sometimes the royal we, and sometimes the first person. Beneath the rustle of the book's continuously evolving language, however, are the consistent drumbeats of its main points. There is only one wonderful God. Muhammad is his Prophet, and the world and human life alike are full of signs of that God's sovereignty. Let's move on now to a different topic. This topic is another central subject in the Quran, the subject of salvation. Islam is, like Christianity before it, an exclusive monotheism and a salvific religion. And thus one of the Quran's principal teachings is that believers will enjoy the rewards of Jannah or heaven, and disbelievers will suffer the punishments of Jahannam or hell. Hearing some of the great many Quranic verses on these subjects, along with its descriptions of judgment day and resurrection, should give you more of a sense of what the Quranic voice sounds like. Along with its teachings on salvation and eschatology or the end of times. Heaven in the Qur' an gets described similarly to the way it was being described in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature during late antiquarian the Quran describes heaven as a vast place having seven levels, and the Quran envisions it as having rivers of water forever pure, rivers of milk forever fresh, rivers of wine, a delight for those who drink rivers of honey, clarified and pure, all flow in it. There they will find fruit of every kind, and they will find forgiveness from their Lord. Muhammad himself is understood to have journeyed there. And at the apex of heaven Muhammad saw the angel Gabriel. As the book states a second time, he saw him by the lote tree, beyond which none may pass near the Garden of Restfulness, when the tree was covered in nameless splendor. While passages about the seven levels of heaven, its four rivers and the summit of heaven are rare and memorable descriptions in the Quran, much more commonly, the book describes heaven as a garden, as Jannah, the Arabic word for heaven means garden. The Quran describes the garden of heaven with frequently repeated epithets. Two representative descriptions from the second and third surahs are as follows. The second surah states Prophet, give those who believe and do good the news that they will have gardens graced with flowing streams, they will have pure spouses, and there they will stay. And Surat Ali Imran, the third Surah, their Lord will give those who are mindful of God gardens graced with flowing streams, where they will stay with pure spouses and God's good pleasure. The phrase gardens graced with flowing streams is repeated very often in the Quran 32 times and perhaps the richest description of heaven in the Quran is in Surat al Rahman, the 55th Surah. Let's hear Surat al Rahman on the subject of heaven in the Penguin Tariff Khalidi translation. In it it are two running springs. In it are of every fruit two kinds. Believers recline on couches, their mattresses of brocade, with the fruit of the garden close to hand. Therein are maidens chaste of glance, undefiled before them by humans or jinn, as if they were rubies or coral. Below these are two other gardens, overshadowing in them are two fountains, ever gushing. In these two are fruits, palms and pomegranates. In them are maidens, virtuous and beautiful, dark eyed, confined to pavilions, undefiled before them by humans or jinn, they recline on green cushions and sumptuous rugs. The next surah contains a similar description of paradise. Let's hear that one too in its entirety, and then we can discuss heaven in the Quran for a moment. This is a second sustained description of heaven and the NJ Dawood translation of Surat Al Waqiya, the 56th Surah. Surat Al Waqiya says that the foremost of the believers shall be brought near to their Lord in the gardens of delight. They shall recline on jeweled couches face to face. And there, there shall wait on them immortal youths with bulls and ewers and a cup of purest wine that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason, with fruits of their own choice and the flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be dark eyed houris, chaste as virgin pearls, a reward for what they did therein. They shall hear no idle talk, no sinful speech, but only the greedy Peace, peace. Others shall recline on couches raised on high in the shade of thornless cedar trees and clusters of acacia, amidst gushing waters and abundant fruits, never ending unbidden. We created the Houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand. So those should give you a sense of what the Quran says about heaven and what believers can expect to find there. If we set Quranic descriptions of heaven alongside biblical ones, we are confronted by a very simple the Bible doesn't ever describe heaven to any great extent. In apocryphal apocalyptic literature like the Enochian Corpus and the Apocalypse of Paul, we read visionary tours of heaven and hell in which heaven is seen as a pagoda like place with many tears and various rivers of milk and honey, such as we catch glimpses of in the Quran. The Bible itself, though, to be very clear, says nothing about heaven other than that it is the abode of God. The biblical doctrine of salvation more often being described as a corporeal resurrection on earth from the Pentateuch all the way to revelation. Thus, one of the reasons the Quranic descriptions of heaven are so memorable Parable is that the Quran is the only piece of canonical Abrahamic scripture to describe heaven with any specificity. Heaven in the Quran is a place of water and plentitude, tasty fruits and comfortable sitting places, truth and genuine conversation, shade and plants and attractive houris for companionship. Women that in the Oxford Halim tradition translation are described as maidens restraining their glances untouched before by man or jinn. Needless to say, the notion that sensual pleasure would be a part of heaven would have made St. Augustine and St. Jerome's heads explode. But the Quran's numerous references to chaste and alluring female companions as part of part of the heavenly rewards of the pious believer are still important components of Islamic tradition. The Quran then describes heaven in several sustained passages as a lush, comfortable, satisfying place where believers who have braved the challenges and privations of a sometimes harsh world are rewarded for being honest, trustworthy, praying and following the Quran's framework of revolution rules and above all, believing in God. Heaven, however, is of course only one of two possible posthumous destinations for humans in the Quran, the second destination being a rather different one. The Quran mentions hell hundreds of times, most often briefly as the destination of unbelievers in one of several epithets, most often calling it not or fire. The proper noun for hell in the Quran, Jehanam, comes from the Hebrew word gehenna or gehinnom, the name of a valley west and southwest of Jerusalem associated with idolatrous practices since the pre exilic period, which by the time the Christian synoptic gospels were written in the mid to late 1st century, was a general term for a place of eternal punishment in Judaism and Christianity. While hell in the Quran is sometimes called fire and sometimes jahannam, it is also commonly shorthanded as jahim or blazing fire. Most often in the Quran, hell is mentioned briefly as a grim alternative to believing in God and adhering to the truths of the surahs. A few quotes should offer a general sense of how hell is depicted in the Quran. The book says that, quote, hell lies in wait, a home for oppressors to stay in for a long, long time, where they will taste no coolness nor drink except one that is Scalding and dark. A fitting requital, for they did not fear a reckoning and they utterly rejected our messages as lies. Similarly, the Quran proclaims, quote, we have prepared a blazing fire for those who reject the hour when it sees them from a distance. They will hear it raging and roaring, and when they are hurled into a narrow part of it, chained together, they will cry out for death. More graphically, the book announces, garments of fire will be tailored for those who disbelieve scalding water will be poured over their heads, melting their insides as well as their skin skins. There will be iron crooks to restrain them. Whenever in their anguish they try to escape, they will be pushed back in and told, taste the suffering of the fire. While Hell is generally depicted as a place of fire and suffering, a few references in the Quran illustrate the greater topography of the infernal realm and how it works. The Qur' an states that Hell is the promised place for all the wicked, with seven gates, each gate having its allotted share of them. In the Quran's Hell, as a surah, everyone is assigned a rank according to their deeds. Hell is also somehow tantalizingly close to paradise, such that, as the book puts it quite the people of the fire will call to the people of paradise, give us some water or any of the sustenance God has granted you. The Quran also tells us that within Hell there is a tree, a tree that is part of the punishment of the damned. Asura tells us this time in the Dawud translation, they shall dwell amidst scorching winds and seething water, in the shade of pitch black smoke, neither cool nor refreshing, for they have lived in comfort and persisted in the heinous sin. As for you who err and disbelieve, you shall eat from the Zakum tree and fill your bellies with its fruit. You shall drink scalding water, yet you shall drink it as the thirsty camel drinks elsewhere. On the subject of this tree, the Quran states, the tree of Zakum will be the food for the sinners. Hot as molten metal, it boils in their bellies like seething water. And while the Quran has a small handful of passages illustrating some of the specifics of Hell and how it works, most often Hell is described as a ferocious blaze. The Quranic voice explains that quite we adorned the lower sky with lanterns and made them to be volleys against the demons for whom we have readied the torment of the blaze. And to those who blasphemed their Lord, there awaits the torment of Hell. And a wretched destiny it is when hurled therein, they hear it sighing as it boils over. It almost seethes with rage. Whenever a batch is thrown in, its watchmen will ask them, did no warner come to you? And they shall answer, yes, a warner did come. But we cried lies and said that God had sent down nothing. So that should give you an idea of how the Quran describes hell, the scorching, ruthless dungeon of all those who don't believe. Horrific as hell is in the Quran, it is most often presented in double passages that also illustrate the joys and comforts of heaven. Quranic descriptions of hell to Muslims of Muhammad's generation, all the way up to our own, are understood as descriptions of a very real and dreadful place. At the same time, depictions of Hell juxtaposed with descriptions of heaven create a very powerful rhetorical effect in the crew. Hell might be a place of scalding fire and choking smoke, but heaven to dutiful believers is paradise beyond compare, attainable by acknowledging the validity of the Quranic message and adhering to the precepts of Islam. Hearing the vivid comparisons between Jannah and Jahannam that fill so many Quranic surahs, comparisons with detailed multisensory descriptions of each person place, is a powerful part of reading the book or hearing it recited. So we've just heard some of the principal Quranic passages that describe heaven and hell, the posthumous destinations of the pious and the impious, respectively. While the Quran shares the earlier Abrahamic religions doctrines of individual posthumous salvation, the Quran also shares Judaism and Christianity. Christianity's belief in an approaching Judgment Day. This doctrine is significantly different in Sunnism and Shi', ism, and we can talk about that more on down the road. For now, let's sleeve through the Quran just a bit more in this introductory episode and learn about how the Quran describes the Last Judgment. Apocalyptic literature is always a spectacular genre. From the eschatological prophecies of Jeremiah to Zoroastrian writings on the Frasciocherite to the Christian Book of Revelation to late antique Christian and Jewish writings about the end of the world. Apocalyptic writings are full of memorable fireworks with the world rumbling to an end and in Zoroastrianism and Christianity, an actual pitch battle between good and evil. Evil There is a lot for the apocalyptic prophet to describe and set down, and the Quran's apocalyptic visions are as striking and powerful as any Yom al Qiyamah or the Day of Resurrection is mentioned many times in the Surahs as both a promise and a threat. Let's hear some of the Quran's most famous and representative descriptions of Judgment day, starting with one in Surat Al Haqq, the 69th Surah of the When a single blast is blown in the trumpet, and the earth and mountains are borne away and ground up in a single grinding, on that day the event shall befall, the sky shall be rent asunder, for that day it shall be frail, and the angels shall be at its sides. That day angels 8 shall carry the throne of your Lord above them. That day you shall be exposed. No secret of yours shall be hidden. As for one who is given his book in his right hand he will say, here, read my book. Truly I knew for certain that I would meet my reckoning, so he shall enjoy a life contenting in a lofty garden with low hanging clusters. As for one who has given his book in his left hand he will say, would that I had not been given my book and did not know of my reckoning. Take him and shackle him, then cast him into hellfire. That was the Harper 1 study Quran translation what we just heard typifies Quranic apocalypticism more generally. The world comes to an end. Each person bears a book of their deeds, sometimes symbolically carried in a right or left hand, and this book of deeds is read, after which the person is saved or damned. The many descriptions of Judgment Day in the Quran have this general the end of the world is described vividly throughout the book, as when the surahs imagine the sun rolling up, stars falling and mountains exploding, seas burning, and even heaven and hell themselves coming close to earth, a different surah foretells how the sky will be torn to pieces, the mountains will be pulverized into sand, and the hair of children will turn gray. Quranic descriptions of the earth's end focus in particular on the skies torn apart and the sky becoming red hot and the earth quaking and being smashed or outright leveled, and finally the mountains becoming soft as tufts of wool or vanishing or shattering. At one point the Quran describes the peoples of Gog and Magog let loose to swarm swiftly from every highland. The Quran also depicts Judgment Day as a day of physical resurrection, when the dead, following the blast of the divine trumpet, will be renewed, knit from their remains into their physical forms. This miracle of God bringing the dead back to life is only part of a greater resurrection. As God says, we shall reproduce creation just as we produced it the first time. Jesus, the Quran tells us, will be front and center at some of the miracles of Judgment Day. As an early surah puts it on the Day of Resurrection, Jesus will be a witness, and elsewhere Jesus is depicted as destined for special esteem on Judgment Day. The Quran has dozens and dozens of mentions of Judgment Day and resurrection, and when we look at them all together, we can make a few generalizations. The Quran describes Judgment Day as a calling forth and a convocation, an inescapable moment at which all have their deeds laid bare before God. There is tumult and terror on Judgment Day. The end, as we learned a moment ago, involves the skies being ripped to pieces and the mountains smashed to dust. However, there is also a careful order and almost tenderness within the more general demolition of the Apocalypse. In an apocalyptic vision we heard toward the beginning of this episode, the sun is rolled up and the sea boil, but at the same time animals are herded, humanity is taxonomized, and divine justice is carried out. The Quran emphasizes that judgment is an affair as meticulous as it is final. Two famous verses bid the heavenly angels to gather together those who did wrong and others like them, as well as whatever they worshipped beside God, lead them all to the path of hell and harmless them for questioning. This path of Hell, or Sirat al Jahim, later in Islamic eschatology, started being envisioned as a bridge that all humans had to cross, a thin, perilous bridge that hung over hell but that led to heaven. And speaking of extra Quranic materials related to Judgment Day, like the Dajjal, the Sufyani, and most importantly, the Mahdi, many doctrines were later appended to the Quran's core story about the end of the world and the administration of divine justice. But as this is an introductory overview of the Quran itself and not all of Islamic history, I think we've likely heard enough illustrative quotations for one program, both short and long. In the remainder of this show, I'd like to do two things. First, I'd like you to hear some Quranic recitations in Arabic of some of the book's most beautiful and beloved verses. Tajweed, or the art of reciting the Quran, is one of Islam's most beloved traditions, and it would be a shame for you to walk away from even an introductory episode on the Quran without hearing it the way it is intended to be heard. After we hear some of the book's most cherished verses in Arabic topic, I'm going to wrap things up by talking just a bit about scholarly issues surrounding some of the things we've discussed today, issues related to Quranic manuscripts, how we date the text, and how Islamic studies scholarship now currently understands the formation of the Quran. Let's begin by hearing some recitations. At the outset of this episode, I mentioned that one of the things that makes the Quran unique is that in liturgical or religious settings in Islam, the Quran is always recited in Arabic. If a devout Muslim lady from Turkey and a pious Indonesian Sunni and an Ibadi grandma from Oman and a devout Uzbek grandpa and practicing Shia from Iran are in the same room, they all know the same Arabic Quran. Because the language of the Quran is so globally ubiquitous, I thought I'd take advantage of the podcast form to have my seasons editor read some of the Quran's most absolutely famous verses in proper Quranic Arabic while I translate them into English. We've already heard some famous verses in this program and we even heard Surat al Fatihah or the opening the Quran's first lines at the opening of this show in Arabic. Arabic. Let's hear some more of the Quran in Arabic. I want to go line by line through part of Surat Anur or Light, the 24th Surah of the Quran. We're going to hear a verse known in Arabic as Ayat Anur or the light verse, one of the most cherished verses in the whole book. This will be a phrase by phrase translation with Arabic first and then the Harper 1 study Quran translation God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is a niche wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is as a shining star kindled from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west. Its oil would well nigh shine forth even if no fire had touched it. Light upon light. God guides unto his light whomsoever he will. And God sets forth parables for mankind. And God is knower of all things, even without knowing any Arabic. You can hear some of the universal tools of poetry at work there, like assonance or vowel repetition in, in and consonants as in, together with wonderful parallel construction and most famously or light upon light. Anyway, it's one thing to understand that the culture into which the Quran emerged was one steeped in marvelous oral poetry, but I hope that by hearing some of this you can get an idea of what a formidable force the Quran is when restored. So that again was the famous lamp verse. Let's hear another verse from just a moment later in the same surah. One of the things that the Quran very often does is to compare the misguided notions of disbelievers with the correct notions of believers, juxtaposing the foolishness and ill fatedness of the former with the wisdom and blessedness of the latter. The following additional verse from Surat Anur or the light again the Quran's 24 fourth chapter describes the falseness of disbelief with a familiar metaphor. Here it is with the translation again from the Harper 1 study Quran quote as for those who disbelieve their deeds are like a mirage upon a desert plain which a thirsty man supposes is water, until when he comes upon it, he does not find it to be anything, but finds God there. He will then pay him his reckoning in full. And God is swift in reckoning. The metaphor here is as old as humanity, the falseness of a mirage. But the assonance in the original Arabic is as incredible as it is memorable. As in quote in earlier episodes of literature and history, in programs on Hesiod and Homer, we learned just how much mnemonic technology there is in oral poetry, how many tools and tricks exist within it to help bards with memorization and recitation and to engage the ear and imagination of the listener. The Qur', an, both read and recited today, is a bridge between the ancient past and the present of human language, its various kira' at, or different forms of recitation, each having countless ties to the world in which the Prophet Muhammad lived and worked. Speaking of Muhammad and to come full circle, let's go back to Surat Al Alaq, or the clinging form, the Quran's 96th Surah, and hear what is almost always considered to be the first words of the Quran ever revealed. Revealed to the Prophet. In the cave of Hira, where Muhammad was praying and contemplating in the year 610 CE, he heard these words read in the name of your Lord who created he created man from a clinging father form. Read, your Lord is the most bountiful one who taught by the pen, who taught man what he did not know. These six short verses illustrate much of what was to come in the language of Muhammad's life. Later Revelations There are rhymes like and line ends that use consonants. Line endings become line beginnings as in and to be clear, the Quran emphasizes several times that it is not poetry. The Quranic voice states that we have not taught the Prophet poetry. This is a revelation. And in another surah that this Quran is not the word of a poet. It's important to remember that distinction when learning about and discussing the Quran. But at the same time, some literary terms are still useful in order to discuss some of the features of Quranic language. As we've been doing over the past few minutes before we Leave this subject of Islamic scriptures and oral recitation, I thought we should briefly go over the Adhan or the call to prayer. This ritual dates back to the autumn of 6:22 in Medina, when Muhammad selected his companion Bilal Ibn Rabah to recite a call to prayer so that the believers of Medina would be sure to complete their five daily prayers at the right time. So although the Adhan is not in the Quran, the call to prayer is the announcement broadcast from the speakers on minarets by a muezzin who melodiously chants the call to prayer five times a day. The Fajr prayer at dawn, the Dhur prayer at noon, the ASR prayer at mid afternoon, the Maghrib prayer at sunset, and the Isha at the moment the last light vanishes from the western sky. The call to prayer is slightly different between Sunnism and Shi' ism, and some differences exist between Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi' I and Hanbali, Sunnism and Imami and Zaidi Shi'ism. Anyway, here are the words of the Sunni call to prayer without the customary repetitions. Quote Allahu Akbar. God is greatest. I testify There is nothing worthy of worship except God. I testify Muhammad is the messenger of God. Come to prayer, come to success. God is great, greatest. There is nothing worthy of worship except God. Two additional verses exist in Imami Shiism which are I testify Ali is the vice Regent of God and come to the best of deeds. And Sunni at the Fajr or dawn prayer remind those still in bed that prayer is better than sleep some mornings, surely even the most devout might feel disinclined to agree. Anyway, that's it. The call to prayer. Verses within the adhan are repeated to varying extents within different sects of Islam and the call to prayer lasts from three to five minutes. Minutes. So there you have it. Some of the most beautiful and well known verses of the Quran in Arabic along with the call to prayer to give you a sense of what the core tenets and original language of Islam sounds like out loud. So everybody, we've taken a tour of some of the main subjects that the Quran covers and just now heard a bit of proper Quranic recitation such as hundreds of millions of us grow up with. There's a lot about the Quran I haven't engaged with yet. Again, the next program will be on the Quran's legalistic framework and Islamic law more generally. And then the final one will explore some of the books, Abrahamic and Arabian cultural heritage. In this first program though, I wanted to give you A straight up fairly traditional Islamic introduction to the book structure and its main subjects. As this being an English language podcast, my assumption is that that approach would be the most useful here. In the closing minutes of this program though, I wanted to briefly introduce you to some of the main topics of academic study in the Quran. In other words, words, what Islamic studies departments in universities are currently doing with the book. The text of the Quran that exists today, used almost universally by Sunnis and shias, is about 101 years old. It is commonly called the Farouk Edition or the Cairo Edition, and it was first published in July of 1924 in order to create a standard text for Quranic education in Egypt. Egypt an updated version of the Cairo edition was immediately released the same year and then a subsequent edition in 1936. This 1936 edition was extremely successful, becoming standard not only in Egypt but also everywhere else. Islam was practiced in Egypt. Government officials got rid of editions older than 1924 by sinking them in the 19 denial. The intention of this standardization project was a practical one, to establish a uniform Qur' an for Islamic education in Egypt. But the success and ubiquity of the modern Cairo edition, as convenient as it is to newcomers who want to learn about the book, masks a more complex textual and recitational history that even newcomers to the Quran should know about. Early Quranic manuscripts lack vowels and what in English are called diacritics or accent marks, bearing just the consonantal skeletons of words then, and not having what in Arabic are called nuqat or dots and diacritics and irab or declension marks. Early Quran manuscripts contain the phonetic substructures of survival, but also a lot of ambiguities, with certain letters lacking diacritics capable of being read in several different ways. If then it were, for instance, the year 900 CE and you were a bookish person living in Kufa or Damascus or Isfahan, and you wanted to read a surah of the Quran, you'd have some textual puzzles in front of of view. However, merely reading the Quran, in other words, encountering its text in a manuscript, would have been an unusual thing to do around the year 900. As scholar Mohammad Mustafa al Azami puts in the early Islamic period, people were not purchasing Quran manuscripts casually from the local bazaar and then learning to read them by themselves at their convenience. The Quran was in the year 900, as it is now, a text often encountered orally. One learned the Quran from a trained instructor rather than through private reading, and by the year 900. With the Quran around 270 years old, there were already some mighty and well established recitational traditions surrounding the Quran throughout the Islamic world. World In Islamic scholarship, the word kira', a, or more commonly the plural kira', at, which means recitations or readings, is used to describe a number of different methods which had emerged by the 900s, methods of reciting the Quran. Each of these methods had its own standards for how words are pronounced, where pauses take place and for how long, and how vowels and consonants affect sentence syntax. The different recitations according to Islamic tradition served a very practical purpose. Early on, Muhammad's Arabic was in a dialect commonly called Qurayshite Arabic, the Arabic of the Quraysh tribe who controlled the region around Mecca. This was just one of the peninsula's many dialects, and so early recitational styles grew to accommodate the dialects of various groups of Arabic speakers. Numerous hadiths attributed to the Prophet Muhammad's companions, more than 20 Hadiths in fact attest that the Quran was revealed in seven dialects. In the early nine hundreds, an influential scholar named Ibn Mujahid codified seven valid kira', at, or recitation methods. And while other scholars lay listed 10 or even 14 valid Kira', at, there were also traditions of two versions of each kira'. A. Out of these many different recitational differences, the 1924 Cairo edition I mentioned earlier selected a single one to make standard the Hafs an Asim kira' a, or recitation by Asim ibn Abi Anuj, who died around 745 in the tradition of Hafs ibn Suleiman, who died a generation later in 796. This recitational tradition existed in four separate lines of descent or turuq, and texts that preserve these four different lines of transmission have differences from one another. To return to the subject of the Cairo edition of 1924, the Cairo text that is standard today is One of the 14 valid Kira' at that were codified in the second century after the Prophet Muhammad's death. The Cairo edition, while it's a practical text that serves to unify worshippers from different traditions, still has numerous differences from early manuscripts. And because its purpose is theological rather than academic, it is understandably not a text critical edition containing a comprehensive guide to all of the recitational traditions of the Quran and their differences from one another. These basic facts about the modern standard Cairo edition that I'm telling you by the way, are not edgy or esoteric. The different kira' at are evidence of the Prophet's world, a large peninsula where Arabic was pervasive but non standard, peppered in some places by Pahlavi, others by Aramaic, others by Ge', ez and others by Hebrew, depending on where speakers lived. And so naturally recitational differences evolved to suit the contours of living Arabic as it existed in the 600-7- hundreds beneath the stable pages of the Cairo edition that everyone has and reads now, then, there is a long and rich history of scholarship on recitational traditions that have existed since the first caliphate. These different traditions have not proved particularly troubling within Islamic history. The great Quranic interpreter Atabarsi, in a tafsir or commentary finished around 11:39, concluded that all of the variations between the recitational traditions were true and valid in their own ways. While kira' at sometimes show variant readings of words and phrases, often the variant readings are equally sensible and consonant within Islamic tradition. And so delving into the book's recitational history can be as rewarding for the pious as it has proved engaging for various scholars just interested in doing detail work on Quranic language. Research on the kira', at, or recitational traditions of the Quran, then, has long been a fruitful approach to the book and a reminder that the Quran comes from a cultural that had both oral and written traditions for sacred scriptures and everything in between. And while kira' at scholarship is sensible and intellectually challenging enough to ruffle fairly few feathers in Islamic studies departments since the 1970s, far more controversial methods of inquiry have evolved. Let's discuss that more controversial work now. Throughout our programs on Muhammad and the Quran so far I have used a very mainline centrist, albeit sometimes historicist, approach to the foundational events of Islamic history. I've used the biographies of Ibn Isaq al Waqiri, Atabari, and others to narrate the events of the Prophet's life. We learned that there are generally what are called the Meccan and Medinan surahs, and that many verses of the Quran are customarily associated with specific junctures of Muhammad's life. In today's program we also heard the traditional account of how the Quran became codified, how Muhammad's medinan companion, Zayd ibn Thabit, gave an approved manuscript to Abu Bakr, the first caliph, who gave it to the second caliph, Omar Omar and how the third caliph, Uthman, around 644 had this codex cross checked with other Quranic specialists, after which it was validated as the Uthmanic Codex and distributed to the main urban centers of the Islamic world. Traditional Islamic scholarship and general academic inquiry alike for a long time have mostly shared what scholar Gabriel Said Reynolds calls the master narrative of Quranic studies, the notion that the Quran came to the prophet Muhammad from 6:10 to 6:32, and that what we have today is identically or basically the same text. When we leave this central approach to the Quran, though, we enter a field that's generally called the revisionist school of Islam studies. Revisionist approaches to the Quran are uniform in their general rejection of the notion that the Quran came to Muhammad between 6:10 and 6:32. Apart from this very significant departure from traditional Islamic teachings, revisionist approaches to the Quran don't actually have much in common with one another. Using a variety of of strategies in order to undertake the aforementioned rejection, and generally arguing that the Quran came together in later centuries and that hadiths and later biographies evolved during the 7 hundreds and 8 hundreds to elucidate the Quran rather than as actual records of things Muhammad said and did. The revisionist school of Islamic studies tends to elicit perhaps more anger and also more enthusiasm than is strictly warranted due to the unconventional approaches that it takes. As with any religion, Islam has die hard apologists and die hard critics, and both have an outsized interest in heterodox theories related to the Prophet and the Quran. So let's very quickly explore the revisionist school approach to the Quran. Quran. To repeat, the revisionist school of Islamic studies isn't something monolithic. Many of the scholars associated with it, however, share a core skepticism about the long stretch of time between the prophet's life from 570 to 632 and then the main biographies and hadith collections that were compiled two centuries later, alleging that the latter do not offer us an accurate portrait of the former. While skepticism toward the reliability of specific hadiths has been part of hadith scholarship itself since the eight hundreds. And the biographies themselves cite sources and don't pretend to be factually faultless. The revisionist school of Islamic studies goes further and often claims that the quote Quran itself was the creation of later centuries. The American scholar John Wansborough, working at the University of London in the 1970s, argued that the Quran did not emerge from the Hijaz by 644, but instead that the Quran was the product of Abbasid Iraq during the 7 hundreds or 8 hundreds, and even that what is today called classical Arabic was a new language produced during the 8 hundreds specifically for the codification of the Quran. Other scholars followed suit, with archaeologist Yehuda Nevo using Arabic inscriptions discovered in the Negev Desert to explore what may be theological evolutions in Islam during its opening centuries. His findings, published posthumously in 2003. More generally reviewed Revisionist school scholars mine non Islamic works of history alongside numismatics and archaeology in order to explore early Islamic history with source materials different than the traditional Abbasid ones. Other revisionist school approaches have taken similarly unconventional paths to understanding the Quran, though they haven't received wide scholarly endorsement. Scholar Christoph Luxembourg, in a German study published in 2000, argued that the Quran came from Syriac Christian theology and the widespread Aramaic language more generally, exploring junctures in the Quran where Syrian Aramaic words might help make sense of passages that have puzzled traditional Islamic exegesis. More provocatively, the German scholars scholar and philologist Gunther Lulling excavated the Quran's language to argue that the book's nucleus was a Meccan Christian hymnal originally composed in Syrian Aramaic in various unconnected stanzas or pericopes, and then emended and augmented during and after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Luling's argument, first published in 1970, contained some sound philological work, but Lilling packaged this work with heavy handed calls for Islamic reform and Abrahamic religious transformation more generally, which alienated a variety of potentially interested readers. The four scholars I've just described, John Wansborough, Yehuda Nevo, Christoph Luxembourg, and Gunter Lulling, present some of the different approaches the revisionist school of Islamic studies has taken to the Quran. The school again has no unified approach to the book other than a willingness to dismiss the traditional Islamic and indeed traditional academic accounts of its roots in the life of Muhammad between 610 and 632 CE. Just as the documentary hypothesis explorer a post Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch when it arose in the 19th century and the Q Source hypothesis tried to explain some of the shared content in Matthew and Luke, rejecting the traditional Christian theory of apostolic authorship. Revisionist approaches to the Quran are open to different ways of understanding the book's origins than that it came from the ministry of the Prophet Muhammad. As I said before, the revisionist school of Islamic studies has probably generated both more fury and more enthusiasm than it deserves. Its reputation shouldn't rest on the chutzpah of its unconventionality, but instead the granules of its detail work, the archaeological chronologizing of inscriptions by Yehuda Nevo, for instance, and the specific lexical claims of Christ Christoph Luxembourg, verse by verse and word for word, and those who followed them. Additionally, a lot of light has been shed on the early history of the Qur' an by manuscript discoveries and publications about those discoveries over the past generation. From the Sana' a palimpsest to the famous Birmingham Quran manuscript to many others, Archaeology, together with paleography and radiocarbon dust dating have offered significant evidence that the Quran was indeed at least very close to its present form by the second half of the six hundreds, after the famous Uthmanic Codex is traditionally said to have been completed in 644. We will talk a bit more about Quranic manuscripts at the end of the next show. I think it is important to understand unorthodox approaches to sacred texts. We know from studying ancient Greek, Jewish, Roman, and Christian texts that communities often do create rather than record history when they write it. However, we can't really understand the Wellhausen hypothesis without having read the Pentateuch, nor the Q Source hypothesis without knowing the Gospels, nor the recent turn away from Roman historiography without having read some Livy and Plutarch. Analogously, we shouldn't get too deeply into academic Islamic studies, nor certainly revisionist approaches without first exploring the Quran a bit more extensively, which is precisely the plan of our next two programs. The Quran is a unique book. It has, even in English translation, a voice unlike anything else that I have read, one that has gravity and compassion, urgency and serenity, and whose verses communicate an overall message of warm and inspirational optimism. It is, like the Tanakh and New Testament, an exclusive monotheist scripture envisioning exaltation for participants and punishment for non believers. But it is also a later piece of theology than its Abrahamic forebears, written in a place and time when Jewish and Christian theology had matured for long centuries, where deft Talmudic disputation and disputes about christological doctrines had sharpened theological wits, and Judaism and Christianity alike had become more intellectually and culturally diverse, more malleable, and more transplantable. The seventh century, the epoch of Isidore of Seville in Western Europe, was at certain echelons, quite a ripe time for intellectual history and monotheism. And the Quran, Whether due to the grace of God, the genius of Muhammad, the richness of the Hijaza's religious climate, or some combination thereof, Is it text that shows Abrahamic theology at its apex? Sometimes simple and ringingly clear, and sometimes seemingly groaning beneath the weight of millions of pages of text, early biographies of Muhammad, also hundreds of thousands of hadiths and thousands of commentaries, the Quran offers simplicity to those who seek it and complexity to those who see seek it as well, folks. This has been Episode 117 the Quran, Part 1 overview from Learning the basics of the book's struct, structure, size, language and nomenclature essential to the Quran to the traditional account of the book's codification to what the Quran says about God, nature, creation, humanity, heaven and hell to hearing some Quranic recitation in Arabic to briefly dipping into some of the topics pertinent to the last couple of generations of Islamic studies. We've covered a lot of ground so far, but we still have a of lot long way to go. In the Next program, episode 118 the Quran Part 2 ordinances we're going to talk about Islamic law in the Quran. This is a mountainous subject. Just as the Pentateuch established a framework for Jewish law and later exilic communities interpreted and augmented the Torah, the Quran established a framework for Islamic law, which was later interpreted and augmented into different codes by Muslim scholars during different phases of Islamic history. The Quran's laws engage with a wide variety of subjects, covering food and drink, contracts, inheritance, slaves, marriage and divorce, criminal law, prayer and pilgrimage, and more. Today, following an ecumenical proclamation by almost 200 major Islamic jurists in 2005, there are eight main schools of Islamic law, some Sunni and some Shia, each with its own ancient history, its own textual history, and its own muftis or legal experts, past and present. While the scope and complexity of Islamic law is intimidating to the newcomer, its earliest roots lie in the country Quran itself, in several hundred verses that have been read and re read for many generations. As I mentioned last time, I am releasing this sequence on the Quran in quick succession three long episodes, all in October of 2025. These programs are important for obvious reasons and I want you out there listening to hear them back to back. So thanks for listening to Literature and History and in one week's time will learn all about the Quranic foundations of Islamic Law in the Quran Part 2 ordinances, literature and history dot com.