Islam 101- What is the Qur’an?
Islam 101
What is the Qur’an?
Islam is a misunderstood and often vilified religion here in the west. One of the most common ways of attacking the religion is by taking quotes from the Qur’an, the primary source of religious knowledge for Muslims, and trying to prove from a single verse that the entire religion is violent or hateful. Unfortunately, when a person who wants to attack Islam pulls a random verse from the Qur’an as “proof,” they do not take into account the context that the verse was given in, or the verses that come before and after it. Thus, they are often successful in making a benign verse seem barbaric and terrifying.
So what exactly is the Qur’an? Who wrote it? What does it teach? These are very common questions and I will attempt to give a brief overview of the Qur’an with the hope of being able to delve into further details at a later date…watch for those articles.
The word Qur’an is an Arabic word that means “recitation” or “something to be recited.” It is only in its pure form if it is in the Arabic language, any other language is only a translation of the meaning of the Qur’an, but not Qur’an itself. There is only one version of the Qur’an in the world, every single Qur’an from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to the United States is exactly the same in the Arabic text, however, different word choices may have been used in the translation of that text. This is very different than the Bible which has the King James version, the Catholic version which include the Apocrypha, the Revised Standard Version which deletes such important verses as John 3:16 because it is an interpolation that was added hundreds of years