Seyyed Hossein Nasr
George Washington University Washington, D.C.

Letter in the April Atlantic

 The main issue in "What Is the Ko-ran?," by Toby Lester (January Atlantic), is not how one looks at the Koran as a so-called historical text and analyzes it according to the principles of textual or biblical criticism but, rather, how one conceives the very notion of revelation. What corresponds to Christ as the word of God in Christianity is not the Prophet Muhammad but the Koran in Islam. The acceptance of the Koran as the word of God suggests that the so-called historical and textual study of the Ko-ran is tantamount to questioning the historical existence of Jesus Christ, as some people in the West have claimed. The rules of biblical criticism do not ap-ply to the Koran as God's revelation, because what corresponds to the Bible is the hadith collection, which compris-es the words and deeds of the Prophet of Islam as the Bible comprises the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Both the ha-dith books and the Bible were compiled after the revelation, whereas the Koran has existed in its present form from the very beginning of Islamic revela-tion. To claim that the so-called history of the Koran undermines or casts doubt on its being a divine revelation is not only to misunderstand the nature of the Koran but also to go against the his-torical evidence.

 Besides these fundamental points, the author confuses many issues. First of all, the so-called textual and historical study of the Koran does not entail the rejection of the Koran as God's word. Classical scholarship, especially the sci-ences of Arabic grammar, lexicography, and Koranic exegesis, is peerless. To claim that Muslims have not studied the historical and textual dimensions of the Koran is to admit an ignorance of Is-lam and Muslims-unless one intends to blame Muslims for taking their sacred book seriously. The author's mention of some modern Muslim thinkers as proof for his claim that the Koran is not the word of God is flawed and misleading. Although the historicist and modernist reading of the Koran represents only a small minority in the Islamic world, not even this perspective abrogates the Divine origin of the Koran, as the author seems to imply. To claim to read the Ko-ran from a certain historical point of view without denying its sacred character is one thing; to see the Koran as a text devoid of any Divine substance and writ-ten by human beings-in the way many modern Westerners claim the Bible was written-is another.