The sound of the Koran
The holiest text in Islam must be spoken to be understood...
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: The Last Day … End Times in Islam
MUHAMMAD WARNED his readers not to try to interpret the Koran because the word of God was beyond interpretation.
‘He who interprets the Qur’an on the basis of his own opinion will be wrong,’ the prophet is recorded as saying, ‘even if his interpretation happens to be right.’
In light of that assessment, we won’t even try. Instead, we’ll listen to the Koran being recited, and perhaps learn something from it.
In Arabic, Koran means ‘reader’ or ‘to be read’ – that is, to be read aloud, in the tradition of the public poetry recitals that were so loved in the Arab world long before Muhammad’s time.
To understand the power of the Koran, both as a devotional text and as a unifier of the Arab people, we must understand the place of poetry in Arabia in the seventh and eighth centuries CE.
The Arabic word for poet is sha’ir, literally meaning ‘one who perceives that which others cannot’.
The greatest Arab poets were prophets. Highly esteemed and deeply feared, they were entrusted with divining the future, as distinct from the Greek and Roman masters, whose poems tended to hail the great deeds of heroes past.
Every Arab tribe boasted a soothsayer who excelled at poetry, to whom they turned for consolation and warnings about coming events. The best could immortalise a warrior or humiliate an enemy in a few lines.
At competitive recitals, poems were read aloud in the ‘high’ form of Arabic known as ’arabiyyah, a ‘mystical tongue’, according to the historian Tim Mackintosh-Smith.
The seers, shamans, poets and priests who spoke it were revered, for they spoke the language of prophecy.
—
In 632 CE, soon after Muhammad’s death, an editorial team began to assemble, edit and publish a full set of the prophet’s revelations.
The process provoked a dispute over the correct lineage of the prophet as well as many other issues, creating a deep rupture that would lead to the formation of two opposing branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia.
Sunni sources record that Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close friend and father-in-law, who became their first caliph (Muslim ruler and successor to Muhammad) ordered the prophet’s personal scribe to compile the Koran.
Shia sources disagree, arguing that Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was the first to compile the Koran.
A terrific argument arose, the repercussions of which are being felt today.
Whatever the truth, the prophet’s disciples had recorded his earliest utterances on anything they could find – leaves, bones, bits of hide, pieces of wood, potsherds, stones, recycled scraps of imported papyrus.
Their notes were compiled and published as the Koran – the first edition of which appeared in Arabic around 650 CE, and was first translated into Italian in 1547, into German in 1616, and into English in 1734.
—
The Koran met the longing of the Arab people for a devotional text of their own that expressed the word and will of Allah, the Lord of all and the god of Islam.
The Koran is not an easy read. Those hoping for consistency, story, plot, characters or cause and effect will be disappointed.
The phrases stray, the repetitions mount, the lyrical beauty runs into clunky digressions.
The non-Arabic speaker searches in vain for patterns, narrative threads. They find instead a series of lines (ayahs) arranged into verses (surahs) that follow no apparent chronological order or logic. This mattered little to Arabic readers, for whom the Koran’s form and content were believed to be the work of God.
Allah even had a hand in editing the work, according to one claim. Towards the end of his life, Muhammad stated that Gabriel visited him once a year to review the text.
—
The text of Koran has flummoxed the most penetrating of Western readers. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle described the Prophet’s revelations as a ‘verbal onrush’:
‘With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell . . . they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.’
Voltaire observed: ‘The Koran is a rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art. This tedious book is, nevertheless, said to be a very fine production, at least by the Arabs, who assert that it is written with an elegance and purity that no later work has equalled. It is a poem, or sort of rhymed prose, consisting of three thousand verses.’
Most Western readers agree with these assessments. The trouble is, neither Carlyle nor Voltaire knew how to ‘read’ the Koran. In truth, one doesn’t read the Koran, one recites it, in Arabic, and listens to it, as the angel Gabriel had originally commanded Muhammad to do.
—
The Arabic language is uniquely equipped to reveal truths ‘inherent in sounds . . . not in the sense’ of the words, according to Mackintosh-Smith.
And precise syntax, the best arrangement of words, was, according to the tenth-century philosopher Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, ‘the logic of the Arabs’.
Muslims believe the arrangement of the words in the Koran is perfect, as the word of God must be.
When Arabic-speaking Muslims recite the Koran, they transmit a hypnotic blend of sound and sense, of taut, long syllables poised between oscillating short ones that wash over the mind like gentle, incoming waves, their repetitions less a mantra than a melody of submissive elation.
It was this marriage of sound and sense that gave the Koran its miraculous power over the Arab ear and mind.
Non-Arabic-speaking Muslims must rely on translations that, no matter how good, will never convey this mystical union of voice and meaning that in spoken Arabic seems to address you, in person, awakening your soul to Allah’s purpose, and sustaining the euphoric promise that these sumptuous phrases are indeed the words of God.
—
The opening line – ‘There is no god but Allah’ – sounds pedestrian to English ears.
In Arabic it reads, ‘La illaha illa ’llah,’ an enthralling interplay of rhythm and meaning.
When Muhammad’s disciples first heard the prophet recite the revelations, they were ‘swept with awe and fascination by the measured accents of the text, as it is experienced in the depth of the soul’, wrote the theologian Christopher Buck. It was as if God himself were addressing them.
How one recited and listened to the Koran, then, was as critical as what was being said.
In fact, the ideas were often subordinate to the lyricism of the language, observed Ibn Khaldun, the great Islamic philosopher of the Middle Ages (and founder of the social sciences).
Truth inhered in the sound of the ayahs, because the sound reinforced the meaning of what the Muslims believed they were hearing: the words and the will of God.
Repeated daily, these word/sound associations shaped the very consciousness of the listener, and literally changed the mind.
—
Muslims absorbed the Koran in a kind of trance or swoon. Many wept, fell prostrate, humbled by the presence of Allah in the lines.
Muhammad was known to shed copious tears when he heard an especially beautiful recital, delivered in a ‘sweet loud voice’.
The Koran itself offers guidance on how it should be recited:
‘Recite the Qur’an with tartil [slowly, deliberately]’ (surah 73:4), and ‘Do not move your tongue about it to hasten it’ (75:16). Recite it piously, humbly, especially at night, and retain its message.
The Koran so completely dominated the minds of the non-Arabs who encountered it that many would later identify themselves as Arabs.
‘I think in Arabic,’ wrote the twentieth-century Lebanese linguist Abdallah al-Alayli, ‘therefore I am an Arab.’
—
What does the Koran actually say? Much that is beyond our scope, but a few surahs speak directly to the condition and destiny of humankind, and the idea of belief as the animator of human history.
Newcomers to the Koran will find themselves marooned in the strangeness of the language and structure, its looping repetitions and seemingly arbitrarily arranged chapter titles, for example: ‘Mankind’, ‘The Sun’, ‘The Elephant’, ‘The Bees’, ‘The Sand-Dunes’, as well as the lives of prophets, Abraham, Jonah, and so on.
A surah is devoted to the Virgin Mary. Another, to the ‘Night Journey’. And one to ‘Salvation’.
And we’re struck by the tone of unwavering faith, the inescapable certainty, of the surahs, which self-consciously announce the ‘gold standard of divine truth’ by which all previous scriptures should be measured.
The Koran has moments of lightness, even playfulness; at other times, a mood of inescapable tension envelops us in a kind of claustrophobic dread.
In vain one struggles against this envelopment, which states: Submit to Allah – or else!
Thus: ‘Those who do not believe in the faith, their work is in vain, and they will be among the losers in the next world . . . O you who believe, take care of your souls. Those who have gone astray cannot harm you if you are guided aright . . . Those who have lost their souls do not believe . . .’
—
The Prophet’s early revelations warned the world to repent and surrender to the will of Allah or suffer the calamities of Hell on the ‘Day of Judgement’.
These verses resonate with the same sense of eschatological horror, or happiness, that leaven the sacred texts of the Jews and Christians.
Moments of scorn, sarcasm, even mockery enliven the text: ‘Those on whom you call besides God [Allah] cannot create a fly, even if they were to all collaborate . . .’
Some revelations were astonishing for the time. Women, for example, were created from a ‘single soul’ shared by Adam, and not from his rib, and the ‘two of them’ reproduced ‘many men and women’.
The Koran inveighs against the infanticide that was commonly practised by parents who were too poor to afford children: ‘that you do not kill your children because of poverty – we shall provide for you and them; that you do not approach immoral acts, whether open or concealed; and do not kill the soul that God has made sacred, except by right.’
The lyrical beauty of some surahs conjure a mood of rapturous serenity:
‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth. His light is like a niche in which there is a lamp – the lamp in a glass, and the glass like a brilliant star – lit from a blessed tree, an olive-tree neither from the East nor from the West, whose oil almost glows, even though no fire has touched it. Light upon light. God guides to His light those whom He wishes . . .’
Other surahs summon up the terrifying void of the non-believer:
‘Those who disbelieve – their works are like a mirage in a desert, which the thirsty man reckons to be water, but when he gets to the spot he finds it to be nothing . . . Or like the layers of darkness on a bottomless sea, [where] he is covered by a wave above which is another wave above which are clouds, and darkness layer on layer. When he puts out his hand, he can hardly see it. Those to whom God has not assigned light have no light.’
—
As we’ve seen, the early Muslims believed that Islam, as revealed through the Koran, was the culmination of all previous faiths and prophets.
Alas, it would not unite them. A famous passage (11:118) laments, ‘Had your Lord so willed, He would have certainly made humanity one single community [of believers], but they will always [choose to] differ.’
On the contrary, the Fatihah, the opening surah recited by worshippers at daily prayers, admonished a world that had turned away from Allah and rejected the path of the ‘infidels’:
‘Guide us along the Straight Path. The path of those You have blessed – not those You are displeased with [e.g. the Jews], or those who are astray (e.g. the Christians].’
As for atheists or those ‘who persist in disbelief’, there was no hope: ‘Allah has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and their sight is covered. They will suffer a tremendous punishment.’
Next Thursday, 8th May 2025: The Last Day … End Times in Islam
Selected sources and further reading:
Anderson, M. (7 May 2016) ‘The Chronology of the Qur’an’, Understanding Islam.
Carlyle, T. (1993) On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History, Oakland CA: University of California Press.
Jones, A. (transl.) (2007) The Qur’an, Harrow UK: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust.
Khaldun, I. and Rosenthal, F. (transl.) (2005) The Muqaddimah, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Mahdi, A. (1 October 2022) ‘When Was the Quran Written?’, Islam4U, Islamic Online Education Platform.
Rippin, A. (ed.) (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Rodinson, M. and Carter, A. (transl.) (1985) Mohammad, London: Penguin Books.
Voltaire (2015) Collected Works of Voltaire, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.
Suleiman, Y. (2003) The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.