Topic: Corruption

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Important Words:

بطانة (intimate friends) is derived from بطن i.e. it was or became hidden. بطانة means a lining; an inner vest; a close and intimate friend or friends; a friend or friends to whom one reveals one’s secrets (Aqrab).

خبالا (corruption) is derived from خبل. They say خبله i.e. he made him or it corrupt or evil. خبله الحزن means, the grief affected and vitiated his reason. خبل الرجل عن کذا means, he confined the man and prevented him from it. خبالا means, corruption or bad condition whether of body or reason or actions; loss or deterioration; ruin or destruction; fatal poison (Aqrab).

عنتم (in trouble) is derived from عنت. They say عنت الشیء i.e. the thing became bad or corrupt. عنت فلان means, misfortune befell him and he got into trouble. عنت زید means Zaid met with a calamity and was ruined. عنت العظم means, the bone became weak and broke after it was in a good condition. عنت الرجل means, the man committed a sin (Aqrab). See also 2:221.

Commentary:

The words لایالونکم خبالا rendered as, they will not fail to corrupt you, may also mean: (1) they have no scruple in ruining you; (2) they leave no stone unturned to spoil your work; (3) they will do what they can to corrupt your religion; (4) they are always busy injuring you.

The words ودوا ما عنتم (they love to see you in trouble) may, in the light of the meanings given under Important Words above, mean: (1) they love to see you fall into calamity and misfortune; (2) they love to see you perish; (3) they love to see you become weak and broken; (4) they love to see you become sinful.

Obviously, this verse refers to avoiding such non-Muslims only as are at war with Muslims or such as seek to injure Islam in any other way. It does not require Muslims to have absolutely no relations with any non-Muslim. Elsewhere, the Quran says:

Allah forbids you not respecting those who have not fought against you on account of your religion and who have not driven you out from your homes, that you be kind to them and deal equitably with them. Surely Allah loves those who are equitable (60:9).

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Commentary:

This verse furnishes a powerful proof of the truth of the Quran and of its Divine origin. In fact, the promise about the preservation of the Quran made in this verse has been so remarkably fulfilled that even if there had been no other proof of the truth of Islam, this alone would have sufficed to establish its Divine origin.

Verse 8 contains the demand mockingly made by disbelievers that if the Quran were really as grand a Book as it was claimed to be, it ought to have descended under the guardianship of angels. This ridicule of disbelievers has been answered in the present verse, which emphatically says that the Quran is indeed a sublime Book and that God Himself has undertaken to act as its Guardian and that He will always protect it against every kind of corruption and interference. And in order that this promise about the protection of the Quran may gain still more force, particles expressive of special emphasis, such as انا (verily We) and نحن (Ourself) and again انا followed by ل (most surely) have been used in this verse. Thus the claim has been made in the most emphatic and forceful language.

The statement that God Himself is the Guardian of the Quran does not mean that angels do not guard it. They also do so, for when the master himself is guarding a thing, the servants must also be necessarily engaged in that service. By saying, most surely We will be its Guardian, God, however, points to the fact that there are certain peculiarities of the Quran which it is beyond the power of angels to guard and, therefore, God Himself has undertaken to do that work.

This Surah was revealed at Mecca. According to Ibn Hisham, it was revealed in the fourth year of the Holy Prophet’s ministry. Sprenger, Rodwell and Nöldeke all agree that it belongs to the Meccan period. Now it is a well-known fact that during the Meccan period, the life of the Holy Prophet and his followers was extremely precarious. They did not even know how to save themselves or where to hide themselves. For no less than three years the Prophet and his few helpless followers were virtually imprisoned in the Shi‘b (valley) of Abu Talib from where they could not venture out. They were under a ban. Is it not then astonishing that when the very lives of Muslims were in peril and the enemy was so strong that he could easily crush the new Faith, disbelievers were challenged to do all that lay in their power to destroy the Quran, and were told that God would frustrate all their designs because He Himself was its Guardian? The challenge was open and unequivocal and the enemy strong and ruthless. But what was the result? The Prophet and his Companions not only remained safe and sound but thrived and prospered and the number of converts continued to swell and the Quran remained safe against all corruption and has ever continued to enjoy perfect security. This distinctive feature of the Quran has not been shared by any other book revealed to any other Prophet.

Sir William Muir, the well-known critic of Islam, says about the Quran: "We may, upon the strongest presumption, affirm that every verse in the Quran is the genuine and unaltered composition of Mohammad himself." Again, "There is otherwise every security, internal and external, that we possess the text which Mohammad himself gave forth and used." Again, "To compare (as the Muslims are fond of doing) their pure text with the various readings of our Scriptures, is to compare things between which there is no analogy." (Introduction to "The Life of Mahomet"). Prof. Nöldeke, the great German Orientalist writes as follows: "Slight clerical errors there may have been, but the Quran of Othman contains none but genuine elements, though sometimes in very strange order. Efforts of European scholars to prove the existence of later interpolations in the Quran have failed." (Enc. Brit.). Professor Nicholson, says in his "Literary History of the Arabs": "Here (in the Quran) we have materials of unique and incontestable authority for tracing the origin and early development of Islam—such mater-ials as do not exist in the case of Buddhism or Christianity or any other ancient religion."

The importance of this security of the Quranic text is further enhanced when we compare it with other revealed Scriptures. The Quran was revealed among an illiterate people, while most other Scriptures were revealed among peoples who were comparatively more literate and therefore better qualified to preserve the purity of their Scriptures. Yet they failed to do so, while the Quran, the most widely read of all revealed Scriptures, enjoys complete immunity from all sorts of corruption. This miraculous preservation of the Quranic text is no mere accident. It has been brought about by the special providence of God in accordance with an openly declared prophecy of the Quran.

The means adopted to safeguard the purity of the text of the Quran have been briefly referred to in verse 2 in the memorable words الکتاب (the Written Book) and قرآن مبین (the Illuminating Recital) signifying: (a) That every verse of the Quran was committed to writing as soon as it was revealed and this writing was most tenaciously preserved. (b) That it was committed to memory as soon as revealed by a number of Muslims. And this pious practice has increasingly continued so much so that in the past centuries hundreds of thousands of Muslims have had the entire Quran literally on the tips of their tongues. Add to this the fact that from the very beginning of Islam the recital of parts of the Quran in the five daily Prayers was made obligatory.

The following additional factors also very materially contributed to the preservation of the Quran:

(1) God has inspired the Muslims with an extraordinary love for the Quran. They enjoy the reading of the Book even if they do not understand the meaning of the text. This leads to its being preserved in their hearts.

(2) The rhythm of the Quran is so sweet and its language so charming and so easy to learn and the construction of its sentences so beautiful that it can be committed to memory with great ease.

(3) God so ordained that immediately after the Quranic revelation became complete, it spread far and wide, to the remotest corners of the world, among all nations and all peoples, so that it became practically impossible for anyone to tamper with its text.

(4) From the beginning the Quran formed for Muslims the basis of all the sciences and learning they acquired and developed with a view to serving it. Various branches of knowledge such as Grammar, Rhetoric, History, Philosophy and Logic were cultivated and developed by Muslims for the sake of a better understanding of their holy Book.

(5) God has preserved Arabic, the language of the Quran, as a living language, while the languages of all other revealed Books, which were not meant to last forever, have become practically dead.

Again, it is not only the text of the Quran that has been preserved intact by God. He has provided for the preservation of its spirit also. This has been done by raising divinely inspired Reformers among the Muslims from time to time. These Reformers, known in Islamic terminology as Mujaddids, receive revelations from God and interpret and explain the true meaning of the Quranic text. Such Reformers appeared among the followers of other religions also, but that was only for so long as such scriptures served as guides for their followers. After the advent of Islam, however, all other religious systems and their scriptures, which were intended only for specific periods and specific peoples, became abrogated and divinely inspired Reformers ceased to appear among them. Now, therefore, the Quran alone among all revealed Scriptures of the world holds the field as a living Book and hence divinely inspired Reformers now appear only among the followers of Islam. In our own time God has raised Ahmad, the Promised Messiah, Founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement, to demon-strate the truth and excellence of the Quran in a manner unparalleled in the history of Islam. Ahmad’s present-ation of Islam is not like one praying for a hearing, as was the vogue among the apologetic school of Muslim writers, but as a victor challenging the protagonists of all other religious systems and the so-called Modernists and Higher Critics to find fault with any teaching of Islam; and also as a judge passing his judgement upon them. The appearance of such Reformers in itself constitutes proof of the living power of a religion and its Scripture inasmuch as they are really the fruit of their religion and their appearance proves its efficacy.

The question here arises, if the Scriptures revealed to the previous Prophets have not been preserved in their original purity, what guarantee is there to believe that the Quran would enjoy permanent security? In this connection it should be noted that the promise of protection made by God in this verse mentions the word الذکر (rendered in the text as "this Exhortation") and not the Quran or any other word; and herein lies the answer to the above question. For, to become deserving of the permanent protection of God it is essential that the Divine revelation should be الذکر of which the necessary attributes are: (1) that it should establish a close and permanent relationship between man and his Maker, inspiring in the former constant remembrance of God, the word ذکر meaning remembering; and (2) that it should elevate man to a state where God may also remember him or in other words favour him with His words and with heavenly help, the word ذکر also means eminence. The verse under comment thus purports to mean that God undertakes to protect any Scripture so long as it serves the above two purposes. But when, through changes in the conditions and circumstances of man, any Scripture ceases to perform these functions and God, in His infallible wisdom, deems it necessary to reveal another Scripture, He naturally ceases to extend His protection to earlier revelations. The question as to when any particular Scripture at any particular time ceases to serve the above-mentioned purposes has to be decided on facts. It is a fact beyond doubt that at the present time no religion other than Islam can claim that there is among its followers anyone who fulfils in his person the conditions mentioned above, viz. attainment of such nearness to God that God begins to speak to him and manifests His special powers for his sake. Such a claim can be made only by a follower of the Quran. As stated above Ahmad, the Promised Messiah, has made this claim in our own time and has proved by powerful heavenly signs that his claim is founded on fact and God is helping his cause wonderfully. It is, therefore, natural that Muslims should claim and believe that now the protection of God is a privilege enjoyed by the Quran alone.

As regards the future, our belief based upon promises made in the Quran is that whenever Muslims forget, or fall away from, the teachings of the Quran, God will, by raising heavenly Reformers, restore to them their faith in its pristine purity. The teachings of the Quran will thus remain effective for all time and will ever continue to enjoy Divine help and protection.

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Commentary:

The main theme of the foregoing verses consisted in engendering and instilling in man belief in an Almighty and All-Powerful God, Who creates, regulates and guides all life. In the present verse we are told that when darkness enshrouds the face of the earth and man consigns God to oblivion and gives himself up to the worship of the false gods of his own conception and creation, God raises a Prophet to bring back "the erring flock into the Master’s fold." Such was the condition of mankind when the Holy Prophet Muhammad, humanity’s greatest Teacher, made his appearance. The following quotations support this contention:

"The beginning of the seventh century was an epoch of disintegration—national and social—and religion had become extinct as a moral force and had become reduced to mere ritual and ceremony and the great Faiths of the world had ceased to exert any healthy influence on the lives of their followers. The holy flames kindled by Zoroaster, Moses and Jesus had been quenched in the blood of man…Incessant war for supremacy, perpetual internecine strife, combined with the ceaseless wrangling of creeds and sects, had sucked the lifeblood out of the hearts of nations, and people of the earth, trodden under the iron heels of a lifeless sacerdotalism, were crying to God to deliver them from the misdeeds of their masters. Never in the history of the world was the need so great, the time so ripe for the appearance of a Deliverer ("Spirit of Islam").

In the fifth and sixth Centuries the civilized world stood on the verge of chaos. It seemed that the great civilization that it had taken four thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where every tribe and sect was against the next and law and order were unknown. . .It was a time fraught with tragedy. Civilization like a gigantic tree whose foliage had overarched the world and whose branches had borne the golden fruits of art and science and literature, stood tottering, its trunk no longer alive with the flowing sap of devotion and reverence, but rotten to the core". (Emotion as the Basis of Civilization).

The words "land and sea," may signify: (a) such nations as had no experience of Divine revelation and those that believed in heavenly Scriptures; or (b) nations whose cultures and civilizations were based purely on reason and collective human experience and those whose cultures and civilizations were based on Divine revelation; (c) peoples living on the continents and those living in the islands.

The verse means to say that the nations of the world had become corrupt to the very core—politically, socially and morally, and their corruption was the result of "what their hands had wrought."

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Important Words:

سدرة (Lote-tree) is derived from سدر which means, he was or became confounded, perplexed or dumb-founded. سدر (sadira) means, bewildered, perplexed, confounded. سدر (sadirun) means, the sea (Lane & Aqrab).

Commentary:

In view of the root meaning of the word the verse may signify that in his Spiritual Ascension (معراج), the Holy Prophet had reached a high stage of nearness to God which was beyond human mind to conceive; or it may signify that at that stage a sea of endless vistas of divine knowledge and eternal realities and verities opened out before him.

Or the verse may possess a symbolic allusion to the fact that divine knowledge vouchsafed to the Holy Prophet would, like the Lote-tree, give comfort and shelter to the tired and jaded limbs of the spiritual wayfarer. Or it may possess a prophetic reference to the tree under which the Companions of the Holy Prophet took the oath of fealty at his hands at the time of the Truce of Hudaibiyyah. Moreover, as the leaves of the Lote-tree possess the quality of safeguarding a dead body from corruption, the verse may signify that the Teaching revealed to the Holy Prophet not only is itself immune against corruption but is eminently fitted to save and preserve mankind from moral corruption.