Table Talk
by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din
Chapter 8: Revelation of the Quran a Necessity
The Bible and other Sacred Books:
If word came from God from time to time for human guidance in olden days, Divine providence for our spiritual growth would be wanting in consistency and universality, if its message reached us in an adulterated condition. That almost all the books, passing as revealed, excepting the Quran, are not free from human interpolation is a truth admitted even by the adherents of those books. The books of the Old and New Testaments have now been declared, even by ecclesiastical authority, to be unauthentic in many places. Solomon never wrote the books known by his name, nor was Moses the author of the Pentateuch, and the same is the case, more or less, with every other book in the Bible. But it is said that these holy books are partially genuine. How to sift right from wrong is another difficulty. We possess no real means of doing it; all ingenuity and labour, till now, has been a mere waste. We believe the Bible a partial fabrication, yet millions of people accept it as the Word of God, in its entirety.
How inconsistent is the human mind! We prefer to have things in their natural form, where every day eating and drinking are concerned. We will not quench our thirst with the water taken from ajar in which someone has put his hand by mistake. Articles of food prepared under a process dispensing with the touch of human hands, will always command a market. We are thus scrupulous in our physical diet, but we lack the same prudence in matters affecting our spiritual sustenance. If a document partially admitted to be forged, is not acceptable in evidence in any court of justice, why should the Bible command our respect as the Word of God, if a considerable portion of it is unauthenticated?
Again, Divine providence becomes defective if God closes the door of revelation to humanity after a certain period in human history. If the Divine economy deemed revelation necessary for human uplifting, the need has surely not come to an end. We are the same people as our ancestors were, with the same deficiencies and the same limitations. Our forefathers had no superior claims on His providential dispensation. We are as much His children as those who lived in ages gone by. If the revelation of His Will was a necessity to frame the spiritual fabric in ancient days, the need is the same in our days. A just and impartial God should, surely, do one of two things; either He should preserve His Word, revealed before, in its entirety and put it, in its original purity, into our hands, or He should replace it with a new Revelation, in case the former shall have become polluted by human touch. Do we not observe the same phenomenon in the whole world around us, as far as His physical dispensation is concerned? There are certain things in Nature, which are above all human interference, and therefore free from pollution. Such are the sun, the moon, the solar system generally, and very many other things in space which, being free from human possession, have always remained in their required shape, and need no substitution in their service to humanity. But things that lose their purity and become impaired in their usefulness are replaced from time to time by a new supply. We cannot live without water, if fresh water means life to us. It loses its utility when spoiled with earthy matter, and we cannot use seawater for irrigation purposes. Fresh supplies of water come every year from heaven to give life to the whole earth, therefore, thus argues the Quran, when it shows the necessity of its revelation to this world:
وَ مَاۤ اَنۡزَلۡنَا عَلَیۡکَ الۡکِتٰبَ اِلَّا لِتُبَیِّنَ لَہُمُ الَّذِی اخۡتَلَفُوۡا فِیۡہِ ۙ وَ ہُدًی وَّ رَحۡمَۃً لِّقَوۡمٍ یُّؤۡمِنُوۡنَ ﴿۶۴﴾ وَ اللّٰہُ اَنۡزَلَ مِنَ السَّمَآءِ مَآءً فَاَحۡیَا بِہِ الۡاَرۡضَ بَعۡدَ مَوۡتِہَا ؕ
“And We have sent this book to you in order to remove the differences into which these people have fallen, and it is a blessing and a guidance for those who believe; and Allah sends down rain from heaven and gives life by it to the dead earth” (The Quran, Chapter “The Bee” [16:64–65]).
Want of rain even for one year will kill all vital forces of the earth. Drought means death. Any amount of water in the ocean or in lakes becomes of little use to us, if the water does not come from the heavens. If water is the life-giving principle for physical nature, then is revelation most assuredly life to the soul. If God never fails to send water from heaven when its former supply has failed or become vitiated, how can He sit silent when the Word itself that came from Him in bygone days is no more heard, or has become corrupt? Here is a logic clear enough to the average mind, yet the luminaries of the Church in the West do not seem to have grasped it. They are, on the one hand, conscientious enough to admit the unauthenticated nature of the Bible, but on the other hand, they will not admit the necessity for any revelation subsequent to the ministry of Jesus — finding full satisfaction in the theory of a new dispensation — the grace of “the blood.” This has relieved them of any need for Divine guidance.
Guidance of conduct in every sphere of human activity they do need, and they admit it; but in matters religious and spiritual it is otherwise. Here they rely instead on some sort of miraculous transformation which, they hold, is wrought in them by the simple fact of their belief in the blood of Jesus.
Man was given the law, so runs the argument of the Church, following in the footsteps of St. Paul; but inasmuch as it was not in man’s power to obey it, the law became a curse to humanity. The Old Covenant of “law and obedience” did not work well, argues the Church; God had failed in His experiment; and so, after some four thousand years, He was pleased to grant us a new Dispensation which was revealed in the Cross, and relieved man from his obligation to observe the law — a principle absurd on the face of it, especially in the light of daily experience.
We cannot afford to dispense with the observance of law in any phase of our life. Our very existence depends on the working of certain laws. But for the law, our life and property cannot be safe from danger. The very existence of the whole universe depends upon the law of the universe being strictly observed by every component of the universe. Propriety of conduct means consistency with the law, and misbehaviour means disrespect of the law. Disease is only a corollary to the breach of hygienic laws, and immorality a violation of the law of society. In short, regard for law is the lever on which the machinery of all civilization and progress is working, and one fails to appreciate that psychology of mind in certain people, which bows down to the law in everything except religion.
The theory of the New Dispensation of Blood is, again, an unjustifiable stigma on the universality of Divine Providence. If belief in the blood was the sole efficacious means of human salvation, why were not the generations before Jesus given the benefit of this blessing? If the religion of law and obedience was only a curse to humanity, as St. Paul says, why was the ancestry of Jesus, and with it the whole world saddled with that evil? Again, the greater part of the world remained ignorant of this new epiphany for centuries. It was not until the last century that most of the world came to know of the Gospel which has wrongly been fathered on Jesus. Ought not the New Dispensation to have been universal, if it came from the Universal Father?
Again, one fails to understand the reason for choosing a particular time in the history of man for this revelation. To say that God wanted to give a trial to the Old Covenant is, surely, a gross insult to His Omniscience. He must have known from the very beginning that His machinery of the law for human betterment would be a failure, and if the Sacred Carpenter from Galilee had indeed, to make and bear the Cross for the salvation of humanity, the event of the Crucifixion should have taken place either immediately after the commission of sin by our first parents, or on the last Day of Judgment. That God created man under a certain covenant which the latter violated, whereupon God repented and saw the solution in atonement, are theories well enough for children in the nurseries, but to present them to cultured minds is simply an insult to intelligence.
The book of Islam, in justification of its revelation, offers us a logic both simple and true. It refers us to the universal laws of Providence which have been working since the creation of the Universe. Whatever is needed for the existence of man, and the provision of which is not within his reach, comes directly from God; and if the old becomes extinct, or is rendered unworthy of use through corruption, the new comes from above to meet the need. Divine Revelation came to guide humanity in every time and clime, and if man lost it or polluted it, God sent it anew. We Muslims do believe that every nation has been blessed with this message of guidance from God, every class of the human race has had its prophet and every country its guide; they left the Word of God with their followers, who through various causes could not keep their sacred books in their original purity, and so God was pleased to send the revelation of the Quran, the genuineness of which has been admitted on all hands. Friends and foes alike accept the Quranic text as pure, as it came from the sacred lips of the Prophet Mohammed, but, all other revelations have lost their genuineness, The Quran came at a time when all those natural or artificial barriers which separated one nation from another some two thousand years before, had been to a great extent removed, while efficient means of communication have since made the whole world as one nation for intellectual and spiritual culture. The necessity of giving a separate revelation to each nation exists no more. One Book may act as a light to the whole world.
The Vedas:
Now a few words as to the Vedas — The Sacred Book of India. Under the teaching of the Quran, a Muslim need not disbelieve in its Divine origin.
وَ لِکُلِّ اُمَّۃٍ رَّسُوۡلٌ ۚ
“Every nation was given a prophet,” [The Holy Quran, 10:47]
and
وَ اِنۡ مِّنۡ اُمَّۃٍ اِلَّا خَلَا فِیۡہَا نَذِیۡرٌ ﴿۲۴﴾
“There is no race which had not its Warner from God” [The Holy Quran, 35:24]
this is the teaching of the Quran. And a Muslim must believe that India had its own prophets in the person of the Vedic Rishis; Rama Chandra, Buddha and Krishna belonging to the same category. But the question is, as to the genuineness and universal utility of the holy writs that came from these sages in India. Very little has been said against the genuineness of the Vedas, except the supposed assertion of Valmiki that the book is not complete and is missing in many “sutras.” The remark seems to be correct. Keeping all human needs in view the Vedas in their present form are not sufficient guide, and even what we have in our hands is of no great importance as far as its usefulness to humanity in general goes. It possibly contains inestimable treasures, but they are sealed to man. The book is written in language which has ceased to be our popular tongue for thousands of years. People differ in its interpretation. Various schools of thought, absolutely contrary in their tenets and doctrine, claim to receive their inspiration from the same book. They cherish beliefs poles apart from each other, and yet they contrive to fortify these contradictions by verses from the Vedas. How this can be done is simply a mystery. The only possible explanation lies in the difficulty which we encounter in appreciating the true meanings of the Vedas — a difficulty which is unsurmountable; neither grammar nor lexicon can help us. The water that came from the heavens themselves thousands of years ago to the Himalayan plains for the fertility of the human mind, may possibly have remained unpolluted from earthly matter, yet would seem to have sunk into the recesses of the Himalayas too deep for human reach. Should the descendants of the Rishis spend their ingenuity and time in removing mountain after mountain to avail that elixir, or should they believe in the Divine universal Providence, and accept the water of life in the shape of the Quran, which was given to humanity at a time when past revelations had become either corrupt or, like the Vedas, of little use for the purpose for which they have been sent. The Quran does not claim to bring a new religion. It gives the same pristine religion of law and obedience, revealed to every nation from above. It contains all those truths which were given in the ancient books.
صُحُفًا مُّطَہَّرَۃً ۙ﴿۲﴾ فِیۡہَا کُتُبٌ قَیِّمَۃٌ ؕ﴿۳﴾
“Scriptures purified contain mighty truths.” [The Holy Quran, 98:2–3]
In this pithy sentence, the Quran claims to contain all the truths given in former days but since adulterated through human hands. It is, in short, the last book of the Revelation of God, sent to restore these others to their original purity, and in some cases to explain anew Divine Truths which had, through antiquity of language, as in the case of the Vedas, become unintelligible.