My late teacher and friend, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2000), described the Koran (certainly for Muslims) as “the eternal breaking through into time; the unknowable disclosed; the transcendent entering history and remaining here, available to mortals to handle and to appropriate; the divine become apparent.”
Here’s how I would describe the Koran:
“A bad-faith appropriation of other cultures’ experience of the eternal put in the service of temporal ends, an obfuscation of the unknowable’s self-revelation as loving Father, a blockage of the pathway between the transcendent and history via the proclamation of finality, available to despots to manipulate the ignorant, the divine become routinized”
The Koran, in this particular sense, is God’s mercy for human beings who, unaided by its words, can scarcely imagine truthfully His presence unless He discloses Himself.
Actually, except for Arabs, the world had a pretty good idea of how to imagine God truthfully without the Koran.
I realize the professor is trying to explain Islam to a non-Muslim audience, but truly, if he has any intellectual gifts, they should be better utilized explaining why Islam is false to a Muslim audience. I guess the former is a much safer occupation than the latter, but without the latter, the only inevitable result is clash of civilizations (although I prefer the “clash of civilization vs. barbarism” formulation).
