ABSTRACT
The Qur’an constitutes the primary source and all-important focus of Islamic faith. Its message forms the very foundation of Islamic communal, cultural and devotional life.1
The entire human undertaking which we call “Islam” evolved in response to the moral, ethical, aesthetical and doctrinal challenges presented by the Muslim revelation. These challenges are best summed up in the concept of tawhid, the emphatic assertion of God’s unity and uniqueness. From this assertion spring all other demands that God has imposed on his servants. As the principal and unrivalled source of Islamic doctrine and practice (even Islam’s major symbols Mecca and the Ka‘ba are secondary, in so far as their significance is explained and conditioned by the Qur’anic text), the Qur’an demands that its followers pay undivided attention to its messages. Once this attention has been offered, the Qur’an becomes for them the direct conduit to God himself, the sole focus of their imaginative power and devotional fervor. In the apt phrase of a Western scholar:
What one did with the Qur’an was not to peruse it but to worship by means of it; not to passively receive it but, in reciting it, to reaffirm it for oneself: the event of revelation was renewed every time one of the faithful, in the act of worship, relived the Qur’anic affirmations.2
