Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)

the ultimate manifestation of God’s grace to man, the ultimate wisdom, and the ultimate beauty of expression: in short, the true Word of God.

This attitude of the Muslims towards the Qurʾān perplexes, as a rule, the Westerner who approaches it through one or another of the many existing translations. Where the believer, reading the Qurʾān in Arabic, sees beauty, the non-Muslim reader often claims to discern “crudeness”; the coherence of the Qurʾanic world-view and its relevance to the human condition escape him altogether and assume the guise of what, in Europe’s and America’s orientalist literature, is frequently described as “incoherent rambling”;² and passages which, to a Muslim, are expressive of sublime wisdom, often sound “flat” and “uninspiring” to the Western ear. And yet, not even the most unfriendly critics of the Qurʾān have ever denied that it did, in fact, provide the supreme source of inspiration – in both the religious and cultural senses of this word – to innumerable millions of people who, in their aggregate, have made an outstanding contribution to man’s knowledge, civilization and social achievement. How can this paradox be explained?

It cannot be explained by the too-facile argument, so readily accepted by many modern Muslims, that the Qurʾān has been “deliberately misrepresented” by its Western translators. For, although it cannot be denied that among the existing translations in almost all of the major European languages there is many a one that has been inspired by malicious prejudice and – especially in earlier times – by misguided “missionary” zeal, there is hardly any doubt that some of the more recent translations are the work of earnest scholars who, without being actuated by any conscious bias, have honestly endeavoured to render the meaning of the Arabic original into this or that European language; and, in addition, there exist a number of modern translations by Muslims who, by virtue of their being Muslims, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be supposed to have “misrepresented” what, to them, was a sacred revelation. Still, none of these translations – whether done by Muslims or by non-Muslims – has so far brought the Qurʾān nearer to the hearts or minds of people raised in a different religious and psychological climate and revealed something, however little, of its real depth and wisdom. To some extent this may be due to the conscious and unconscious prejudice against Islam which has pervaded Western cultural notions ever since the time of the Crusades – an intangible heritage of thought and feeling which has left its mark on the attitude towards all things Islamic on the part not only of the Western “man in the street” but also, in a more subtle manner, on the part of scholars bent on objective research. But even this psychological factor does not sufficiently explain the complete lack of appreciation of the Qurʾān in the Western world, and this in spite of its undeniable and ever-increasing interest in all that concerns the world of Islam.

It is more than probable that one of the main reasons for this lack of appreciation is to be found in that aspect of the Qurʾān which differentiates it fundamentally from all other sacred scriptures: its stress on reason as a valid way to faith as well as its insistence on the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical (and, therefore, also social) spheres of human existence: the inseparability of man’s daily actions and behaviour, however “mundane”, from his spiritual life and destiny. This absence of any division of reality