Aljumuah Magazine

When God Answers

THE STARTLING ADVENT of the Quran’s revelation, in about 613 c.e., announcing the prophethood of Muhammad, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, in Makkah, immediately set off an unremitting tide of anxiety and spiritual awakening among his people, the Quraysh, which sparked a profound and virtually illimitable obsession with questioning the traditional Arabian way of life. Nearly everything about the emergent experience was strange to “authentic” Arabness. No Arab (since hazy antiquity) had professed himself a prophet. No culturally paradigmatic Book—and

expressly one so clearly Arabic and arrestingly eloquent as the Quran—had ever appeared in the decisively defining tongue of this still nomadic-minded people, whose community (ummah) had come to be objectively identified in the human setting of Arabia by its complete scriptural

illiteracy (al-umiyyûn). No heavenly revelation, in any form, had reclaimed provincial Arab purpose in the larger world since Ishmael, alayhe salam, and his father, Abraham, alayhe

salam, raised the Ka‘bah in ancient millennia. And no Arab heart had conceived of a belief, an idea, even a chimera, that would have remotely moved the individual—any individual—to the center of human existence, independent of familial connection or tribal association, let alone envisaged

a religion that would declare all of humanity—irrespective  of language, lineage, or affluence—a single family under one, sole, unseen God, without likeness, to whom every individual human being was immediately and ultimately responsible. Here, of course, is the new call’s single-most “novel” assertion in the ancient Arabian milieu: That their provincial idols—like every other graphic, iconic, or mental commingling of God or His divinity with His creation, whether of physical or metaphysical human manufacture—must go. The new faith’s by-word, Lâ ilâha illa-Allâh, there is no god but the God—as the compatriots of Muhammad, sallahu alayhe wa sallam, directly and correctly apprehended—spelled the end of the legitimacy of Arabian life, and of