message of the qur'an - muhammad asad

[from muhammed asad's introduction to the message of the qur'an. he also wrote the road to mecca - his personal search and how he found 'islam'...incidentally, he became a protege of allama iqbal and served as the first ambassador to the UNO- t]

Thus, the Qur~an tells us clearly that many of its passages and expressions must be understood in an allegorical sense for the simple reason that, being intended for human understanding, they could not have been conveyed to us in any other way.. It follows, therefore, that if we were to take every Quranic passage, statement or expression in its outward, literal sense and disregard the possibility of its being an allegory, a metaphor or a parable, we would be offending against the very spirit of the divine writ.

Consider, for instance, some of the Quranic references to God's Being - Being indefinable, infinite in time and space, and utterly beyond any creature's comprehension. Far from being able to imagine Him, we can only realize what He is not: namely, not limited in either time or space, not definable in terms of comparison, and not to be comprised within any category of human thought. Hence, only very generalized metaphors can

[for the full text of his translation and other notes click on the heading]