THE KORAN.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2699, 12 November 1881, Page 2

THE KORAN.

It is an article of necessary faith throughout the Mussulman world that every word in the Koran was dictated to Mohamed by God through the mouth of the Angel Gabriel and in the Arabic tongue. Ibn Kfaaldoun, an accomplished Moslem historian of standard authority, says :—“ Of all the divine books the Koran is the only one of which the text, words, and phrases have been communicated to a prophet by an audible voice. It is otherwise with the Pentateuch, the Gospels, and the other divine books, which the prophets received under the form of ideas.” This view is folly borne out by the Koran itself. In the 75th Sura, for example, God is represented as saying :—“ Move not thy tongue, 0 Mohamed, in the revelation brought thee by Gabriel, before he shall have finished the same, that thou mayest quickly commit them to memory, for the collecting the Koran in thy mind, and the teaching them the true reading thereof are incumbent on us. But when we shall have recited thee same unto the by the tongue of the angel, do thou follow the reading thereof; and afterwards it shall be our part to explain it unto the.” The Koran is, therefore, regarded by every Mussulman as an objective revelation, Mohamed being only the passive organ of its transmission.—Contemporary Review.”