Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

1. Discovering Scripture in Scripture
THERE is only one way to approach Islam and that is
to open and read from the pages of the Quran. The
Muslim will prefer to hear it, but for the non-Muslim,
the Muslim Scripture is almost always a book and not
the “recitation” (al-quran) that its Arabic title announces
it to be. It is by no means an easy read. The
Quran, or Koran, as it is sometimes spelled, bristles
with obscurities and ambiguities. Highly emotive poetry—or
so it appears; the non-Muslim is normally relying
on a translation, which is not very kind to poetry—alternates
with an often pedestrian didacticism.
Even in translation, the Quran has the sound, look,
and feel of a patchwork, an assemblage.
These are aesthetic judgments made by a palate unused
perhaps to another culture’s high delicacies, and
as such they are of no matter. Or they would be save
that this book itself, or the person speaking through
it—its “voice”—challenges others who doubt its authenticity
to try to duplicate it. The Quran is, on its
own testimony, nonpareil, or to use its own term, “inimitable.”
But there are other elements of this fundamental
Islamic text that attract the attention, often the
surprised attention, of the Jewish or Christian reader.
On those same pages unfolds a terrain that is at once
familiar and alien. The familiar is quickly characterized:
the Quran is biblical, and biblical in the expanded
sense favored by the Christians. Across its pages
pass Adam and Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,