ABSTRACT
In order to maintain the transcendence of the divine in traditional Islamic accounts of revelation, Muslim orthodoxy has insisted on the wholly-otherness of the Qur'an when describing the mode of revelation. Thus, Muslims believe that over a period of 22 years, the Prophet received the literal utterances of God, and he experienced these both aurally and visually. Muslim tradition maintains that they were all conveyed to him through the Angel Gabriel, who in turn had received them from the heavenly “Preserved Tablet” (al-lawh al-mahfūz). Based on this, the Qur'an is understood to be unfettered by human sounds and letters: it is the exact copy of the “Mother of the Book”, which is the archetypal source of revelation. Crucial to this concept is the insistence that the Prophet's role in this process of revelation is confined to relaying these divine words as they were received over more than two decades. As such, he played no role whatsoever in guiding the content or form of the revelation.
