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156chapter threeAsk not questions about things which, if made plain to you, may causeyou trouble. But if you ask about things when the qur"an is beingrevealed, they will be made plain to you… ( Al-M§"ida 5:101)We have agreed that the qur"§n’s preexistence, before its inz§l andtanzÊl, could not have been in the form of an Arabic text. This isbecause if it had been an Arabic text before it was revealed, Allahwould be an Arabic native speaker. This, of course, is an absurdidea. What really happened was that Allah changed the qur"§n fromsomething else into an Arabic text, that is, He changed the text’s‘becoming’ ( al-ßayråra), and the following verses attest to this truth:We have made it a qur"an in Arabic, that you may be able to understand(and learn wisdom). ( Al-Zukhruf 43:3)Therefore, rather than being an Arabic text the qur"§n was objectivereality before its revelation, embodying general, absolute, and eternallaws of the universe, unaltered since the creation of the world. Allahrevealed it for the first time in human history as (an Arabic) text,that is, He developed its ‘becoming’ so that it was, by way of al-inz§l,perceivable by the human mind:We have sent it down as an Arabic qur"an in order that you may learnwisdom. (Yåsuf 12:2)According to this sequence, al-inz§l is the process of transforming( al-ja#l) the absolute laws of life and nature which had been storedprimordially in a ‘tablet preserved’ (lawÈ maÈfåí) and in a ‘recordclear’ (im§m mubÊn), or which were derived directly from Allah’sknowledge (#ilm All§h), into the linguistic form of the Arabic languageso that these laws, which previously existed outside the human mind,could now be perceived, heard, and seen. Al-tanzÊl, in contrast, representsthe subsequent objective transfer of the content of al-kit§b,via the messenger angel JibrÊl, into Muhammad’s brain, from wherehe delivered it verbatim to the people of Mecca and Medina. Whereasal-inz§l occurred in one single impulse during the laylat al-qadr (‘Wehave indeed revealed this [ al-qur"§n] in the night of power’, Al-Qadr97:1), al-tanzÊl took twenty-three years to be completed. The reasonfor this long process of revelation in installments was that Allahwanted to strengthen the hearts of the believers gradually: (‘Thosewho reject faith say: “Why is not the qur"an revealed to him all atonce? Thus (is it revealed), that We may strengthen your heartthereby, and We have rehearsed it to you in slow, well-arrangedstages, gradually’, Al-Furq§n 25:32).