Re: Questions about Muslims and Islam. Please help..
Peace zollen
For the Qur’an to be memorised is an important thing indeed. Not for everyone, but everyone is supposed to memorise some part of it. Why?
Well the first reason is based on the methodology of Islamic practice. We do utilise our brains to reason things out, but if we reach areas that our reasons evade us then we simply accept as a slave would accept the wishes of his master without question without asking why … because perhaps the answer to the question is beyond our understanding.
We acknowledge truth to be different from understanding … that it is possible for us to have the truth and yet be unable to understand it. We believe that every state is possible … the state of knowing what we know, the state of not knowing what we know, the state of knowing what we don’t know and the state of not knowing what we don’t know.
There are wisdoms that we can extrude, but then to say that is the reason means we limit the knowledge … For example, eating pork is forbidden in Islam, the reason given to us in the Qur’an is that it tells us the animal is impure. Now if we use our minds to say that pork used to be forbidden because the meat goes off quickly and there were no fridges that is the reason, then we become susceptible to a big mistake, we will conclude that today pigs are quite clean and we can keep the meat longer therefore we can now eat it … this would be wrong. Impure it may be … but what impure means is not necessarily on hygienic bases … it could be impure in the spiritual sense and no fridge or modern condition will rectify that … so there comes a point that we simply submit to our orders … that is what being a “Muslim” means … one who submits. Questioning to find wisdom and trying to find that wisdom is a good thing … but questioning to find definitive reasons is dangerous and a form of resistance to the love and trust that we aught to be giving God for our affairs.
So our pious predecessors memorised the Qur’an and so do we or we try … and that is the condition of the Muslim some of Islamic outlook is “'aqal” reason and wisdom, but some of it is “naqal” tradition and following …
Now the wisdom that we can extract for memorising the words is that say we one day write down the meaning of the Qur’an and then that becomes the basis for our learning, then years go by people forget about the original script and focus on the translation. Languages develop and move based on the day and age and hence we need to render more editions of the translations to make them fit … for example not so long ago we could write “gay” and it would mean “joyful” but today most places will not use this word to mean that thing.
Since languages develop then in order to preserve the meaning the translations also need to develop … and we get what have in the Bible … many editions and problematic verses which have been relegated to metaphor or meaninglessness … on the other hand by preserving the “text” people can always go back to the source and derive a meaning which is applicable to that day and age without worrying about translational drift … i.e. translating from a translation from a translation so that the last meaning is completely unlike the first …
In fact this is part of the miracle of the Qur’an not only is it’s text preserved due to people memorising it, but also the words don’t change but the meanings do - only they become more and more profound as time moves on … That is why we don’t discover science in the Qur’an, but when science makes a discovery it appears in the Qur’an as though it has just appeared … what I am saying is that since the Qur’an is the Word of God … the words are so precisely calculated in it, that time compounds its verses.