ABSTRACT
Islam is a book-centred though not bookish religion. By ordering Muslims to go by the book (Q:6:155), the Quran makes Islam into a literary faith. Muhammad’s oral inspirations were written in his life-time and codifi ed as canonical scripture. These revelations supplied the fulcrum: Islamic ethics, law and spiritual authority have revolved around it ever since. The Quran is a normative scripture supplying the moral and legal foundations of the world’s youngest universal faith, an axial text of a major language and its literature and a formative guide for a spiritual civilization stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and from southern China to sub-Saharan Africa.
