Koran Kazanskij Shrift
By: November 21, 2018 n What the Qur’an Meant, and Why It Matters historian Garry Wills takes up the admirable task of learning about the Koran. The book begins with a brief introduction justifying the project in the name of contemporary affairs. In Part I, Wills rebukes the various kinds of ignorance and folly that a better reading of the Koran could combat. In Part II, taking up over two-thirds of the book, he is concerned with interpretations of the Koran, often designed to correct the errors enumerated in Part I. Wills doesn’t know Arabic, so he relies on experts for guidance.
He makes especially frequent use of Study Quran (2015), a new English translation with hundreds of pages of commentary, edited by Muslim reformist intellectual Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Pravila oformleniya etiketok v muzee. This is an impressive work, but one that tends to confirm Wills’s own liberal perspective. Wills makes up to some extent for his unfamiliarity with Arabic by means of his Christian background, which proves to be extremely valuable for approaching the Koran. Some of his book’s most illuminating sections involve comparisons between the Koran and Christian scripture.
Jul 31, 2018 - In the linear case, we find that the lateral shift becomes very large at the. As the nonlinearity is turned on, the value of the lateral shift changes rapidly. May 2008 Journal- Korean Physical Society. Koran definition, the sacred text of Islam, divided into 114 chapters, or suras: revered as the word of God, dictated to Muhammad by the archangel Gabriel, and accepted as the foundation of Islamic law, religion, culture, and politics.
The most useful sections are characterized by an earnest inquiry into the Koran’s religious meaning, with an emphasis on themes that should be familiar to fellow monotheists. Chapters 4-6, in particular, consider literary and religious themes in the Koran without any bitter political bone to chew.
In Chapter 4, Wills describes quite beautifully the importance of water and rain in the Koran. Scarce and life-giving for the desert people among whom the Koran originated, water serves as a symbol of divine fertility, guidance, and grace. Water-related imagery also represents the insatiable thirst of hell, and perfect satisfaction of heaven. In Chapter 5, Wills examines the meaning of the cosmos in the Koran. He shows how every aspect of it, from mineral to animal to angelic, speaks to the glory of its creator. Even angels are expected to recognize their dependence on God: Iblis, who disobeyed God by refusing to bow down to His human creation, is transformed into Satan. God’s ubiquity is a great leveler.
Yet this infinitely powerful, remote God is also very close to humans: most importantly, He chooses to speak clearly and succinctly by means of prophecy. In Chapter 6, “The Perpetual Stream of Prophets,” Wills compares the characters of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus in the Bible and Koran, emphasizing just how much the two books have in common. He reminds Judeo-Christian readers that Muslims, far from being simply foreign or strange, belong to another branch of our own tradition.