booke

484conclusionwere more concerned with the truthfulness and authenticity ofthe qur"anic text than with the beauty and stylistic finesse of itsexpressions. Also, to attest to the authenticity of the divine texthas been more important to us than to attest to the validity ofthe many (human) sources of the Islamic tradition, whethertheir authors are highly reputable or not.3. When the Book was revealed it represented a new level of linguisticevolution. It displayed textual qualities that j§hiliyyaArabs had not known before. It contained vocabulary of non-Arabic origins that j§hiliyya poetry had not used. It was arrangedin a composition that is different from the entire textual corpusof the j§hiliyya period. In this volume we have therefore notused the common exegetical strategy to refer to j§hiliyya poetryin order to explain the text of the Book. We believe that thispoetry reflects the specific cultural characteristics of its period,and its poetical expressions are only beneficial and pleasing forthe people who lived at that time. It is therefore of no use forour contemporary understanding of the text. In j§hiliyya poetrywe find, for example, no reference to the earth’s gravity or itsroundness because Arabs then had not known anything aboutthat. In our study we have instead applied the principle thatthe authenticity of Allah’s Book is confirmed by modern scientificdiscoveries and not by its aesthetic impact. In adding newdiscoveries to our knowledge, human societies take part in constructingthe meaning of the text inasmuch as they find in thetext the discoveries they have just made. No matter how rapidlysocieties develop, human beings will always remain in perfectharmony with the qur"anic text, because creation evolvesin the cosmic orbit which the qur"§n prescribes. To go back toj§hiliyya poetry would mean a regress in knowledge and a returnto a primitive, premodern understanding of the divine text.4. We have shown that the Book guarantees complete congruencebetween its content and the reality of our existence, includingthe laws of nature and the universe as well as the innate dispositionof human beings. Nothing that the Book contains have wetreated as insignificant, trivial, or banal. Divine revelation, bydefinition, is always of the utmost importance to human beingsand can never lose its relevance, regardless of the circumstancesin which it is perceived. One does not need revelation in orderto learn, for example, that a jar will break if smashed to the