The Transformative Power of the Quran
By Reading Islam Staff
20 June 2013
The Quran has the power to change people and to transform societies.
In fact it had a powerful impact on those who first heard its message and felt that God was speaking directly to them.
How can we replicate that impact more than 1,400 years later?
How can we use the Quran to transform ourselves and our lives to the better?
Host: Sister Safiyyah Ally, of “Let The Quran Speak”
Guest: Dr. Shabir Ally, President of the Islamic Information Centre, Toronto, Canada
Q: We know that in the time of the Prophet, in Makkah and in Madinah, when the people were receiving the revelation, they felt the impact of it very strongly. They felt that it affected their lives, and they changed their lives as a result. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience, and why it was so powerful for them?
Dr. Shabir: Many reports show that the Prophet, peace be upon him, himself was deeply moved by the Quranic revelation, and those around him were also similarly moved.
To begin with, the Prophet Muhammad himself had the experience of the angel visiting him and giving him these words of inspiration directly from God, and his community believed firmly in that experience, as they could see according to some of these reports, some of the physical manifestation of this. They would see that the Prophet’s body might become very heavy for example, and that confirmed for them the saying of the Quran “Indeed, We will cast upon you a heavy word.” (Al-Muzzammil, 73:5)
Of course what is meant here is “heavy” in terms of its meaning and importance, but they also felt that this has a physical impact in weighing down the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, so that if he was sitting on a camel, some of the reports say that the camel itself would become flattened to the ground because of the weight of the message.
Q: So I guess seeing that, they must have taken the revelation very seriously then?
Dr. Shabir: Yes, they did take it in fact very seriously, and some of the reports about the earliest Muslims show that they wept when they recited the Quran, it had this moving emotional impact upon them.
Abu Bakr, the first Caliph – you are talking here about the equivalent of a head of state – but he wept when he recited the Quran. Umar too, was known to be a very strong and powerful individual, but he wept when he recited the Quran.
Q: How did the Quran impact their lives, these early companions, these early individuals who felt like that God was speaking to them?
Dr. Shabir: At first the impact was slow because the people were entrenched in their ways, their customs, their habits and so on. They were habituated to certain things, and now the Quran is saying don’t do those things. So it took a while for them to transform their lives, and in fact to rally to the call of the Quran and to go with the flow of its message.
But once they did, it is reported that when the commands came to abstain from certain things, they abstained immediately, such as for example drinking wine, which for them was quite a favourite, but now the Quran says don’t do it, and they stopped immediately, so they spilled their barrels of wine.
When the Quran gave legislation to adopt a certain modesty in behaviour, it is reported that the women could immediately be seen adopting this style of dress that would reflect the Quranic dictate.
And so, one after another, the Muslims were being transformed by the messages which came from God gradually over time.
Revelation Process
Q: So the Quran came as a process, it was not just the whole revelation together, but it came piece by piece? Did it begin as a message of Monotheism? How did this message progress?
Dr. Shabir: Just to clarify this matter a little further, most people are familiar with a book being written and published all at once, with the book properly bound.
But the Quran was a series of little inspirations given to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, so he would recite some parts which would sound like poetry for some people a little bit at a time, until eventually the whole thing was done, and then all of these recited pieces were memorized and put into writing by his companions, and eventually collected in the form of a book a few years after the Prophet’s death by people who had memorized and written it down, so we can be assured that we are getting the whole thing and only the Quran as the word of God.
So with this in mind now, the Quran then was revealed a bit at a time over this period, as a process as you rightly put it, so that people can gradually be assimilated to the Quranic world view, and a very important part of that world view is the view that there is only One God, Monotheism. Whereas previously, people were familiar with many gods, they had many idols in the sacred centre of worship, which Muslims make pilgrimage to, to this day, but with the difference being that Muslims worship One God, the Creator of the Heavens and the earth, and there are no more idols in that sacred place.
But being already accustomed to worshipping many idols, and depending on all of these many idols to direct their prayers to, many found it difficult to rally to the Islamic call that there is only One God. You know, all of these gods are suddenly made One? Would one God take care of all our affairs? … And so on.
And what about the fact that this One God seems so far away, and we need intermediaries to arrive to that One God? So they worshiped the other gods as conjugates to direct their prayers to the ultimate God, and Islam said well you don’t need all of these conjugates, and saviours, you just need One God, the Creator of all, to direct your prayers to Him, because wherever you are, He can hear you, He sees you, and He can respond to your prayers.
God is Speaking to You
Q: So did people take to this message over time?
Dr. Shabir: Yes. Of course it took a while for them for more and more people to rally to this. At first the followers were few and they were persecuted, but eventually more and more people came into the fold. Now your question is how can we recapture that?
Q: Yes, because we feel very separated from that sort of reality where it seems like God is speaking to us, and the revelation seems very special and important and it seems applicable to our lives. So how do we replicate that today?
Dr. Shabir: Well, Khurram Murad, in his book “Way to the Quran”, which is very widely available wherever Muslim books are sold, encourages Muslims to read the Quran with the idea that God is speaking to them directly through this Book. Now, of course there are limitations to that general way of looking at the Quran in this way, but for the most part it works.
Read the Quran as though God is speaking to you, and see what difference it makes to you now, taking this to be the Word of God. Many Muslims do this and in fact they do this naturally as they know that the Quran is the Word of God. Many non-Muslims as well reading the Quran get the distinctive feeling that God is really addressing them, and that becomes a reason for them to embrace the Quran as the Word of God and for them to embrace the religion of Islam on the whole.
Because normally, we find in the scriptures that we know of, that somebody is writing about God. So we find for example that in the Old Testament, there is a description of the prophets, and Abraham, and so on, there is a description of Moses and God speaking to Moses. So here we have like a third person describing the fact that God spoke to Moses.
But in the Quran, we have it like in the first person. God Himself is speaking. God saying We created the Heavens and earth, We created you from a tiny drop of fluid, We fashioned you in the wombs of your mothers, We cause you to grow and develop, and now you are going to be ungrateful to Us?
So it is God directly addressing the human person. So when one feels that and gets the experience of this direct communication from God, it is hard to turn back from Him, it is hard to turn away into another direction and ignore this message from God.
Q: The Quran uses stories and examples that may be foreign to us. How do we bring those examples to bear on our own realities?
Dr. Shabir: By first understanding the dynamic in which we receive the Quran.
So think of the Quran being revealed vertically from Heaven down to earth, in a particular time and place some 1,400 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula, and think about the time that has passed since then, 1,400 years ago to our present time, so think of that as a horizontal bar.
So we have the vertical revelation down at one moment in history, and the transference of that revelation being handed down over centuries to us, to where we are now. Now complete the triangle by putting the hypotenuse on that triangle, so now we see the whole picture. It’s not only that vertical revelation down at a certain time, and not only that transference of that revelation, from one generation to another until our present time, but we see also that oblique line, the hypotenuse of that triangle.
Take the whole thing into consideration, and now we can understand how the Quran applies to us. It is a fuller understanding, not only being stuck within that community that existed 1,400 years ago, nor only taking the handed-down tradition as it came to us over this horizontal period, but also seeing the broader picture, paying attention to that oblique line as if God, though speaking 1,400 years ago, is still speaking to us today through that oblique line of communication.
Q: So how important is it for us to not merely read the Quran but also reflect on its message?
Dr. Shabir: It is important that Muslims pay a lot of attention to the Quran, and one way of doing this is to read it regularly. If you read one page of the Quran, let’s say in the morning before going to work, it may only take you five minutes, but within those five minutes you will have within the page a summary of many messages, found throughout the Quran. You may have a book which deals with a certain topic chapter by chapter, with each chapter dealing with a different topic, and you don’t come back to this topic because once it is dealt with it’s over and done with, right?
But in the case of the Quran, the topics are repeated and they are inter-disbursed and they coil around each other like double-helixes, throughout the book. So that no matter where you are reading, you are capturing a certain essence of the Quranic message within that one page.
So if you read that one page and you ponder the meaning, then you will get the same sense that people had some 1,400 years ago that God is speaking to us today, and that He has a message that is practical and livable until this very day.
Host: OK, thank you for that brother Shabir
Dr. Shabir: You’re welcome.
Source: http://www.onislam.net/english/reading-islam/understanding-islam/belief/revelation/463188-the-transformative-power-of-the-quran-video.html
URL: https://newageislam.com/interview/the-transformative-power-quran/d/12303