ABSTRACT
HOW THE QURʾAN DEFINES ITSELF The Qurʾan is the word of God. A view accepted widely among both Muslims and orientalists is that the Qurʾan has the same function in Islam as Christ in Christianity. Christ is the incarnation of God on earth; the Qurʾan is the Book in which the word, the word of God in fact, is so to speak “made esh” in the midst of all human beings. We have already seen how the earlier theologians argued over whether the Qurʾan was created or uncreated and have largely accepted that it is possible to say that the Qurʾan can be seen to accord with the Ashʿarite position rather than the Muʿtazilite. We read on this: “it is a glorious Qurʾan [inscribed] on a ‘Preserved Tablet’ (lawh mahfuz)” (85.21-2). In other places there is talk of a celestial archetype or “Mother of the Book” (umm al-kitab), a sort of matrix from which the Qurʾan was produced “physically” as men wrote it down, read and recited it (3.7; 13.39). Of course, all these passages do not prove univocally that the Qurʾan was not uncreated, but the letter of the text seems to point rather to support of the Ashʿarite position. The Qurʾan, whether or not it is uncreated, is revealed in a human language , “in a clear Arabic” (see 26.195), a holy language, but it is “a message for everyone” (38.87), “a warning for all creatures” (6.90). Whatever we have seen about
the revelation being in Arabic, it is a universal message sent down to all people.
