History of computer science

History of computer science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The history of computer science began long before the modern discipline of computer science that emerged in the twentieth century. The progression, from mechanical inventions and mathematical theories towards the modern concepts and machines, formed a major academic field and the basis of a massive world-wide industry.

Early history

Early computation
The earliest known tool for use in computation was the abacus, and it was thought to have been invented in Babylon circa 2400 BCE. Its original style of usage was by lines drawn in sand with pebbles. Abaci, of a more modern design, are still used as calculation tools today.
In 1115 BCE, the South Pointing Chariot was invented in ancient China. It was the first known geared mechanism to use a differential gear, which was later used in analog computers. The Chinese also invented a more sophisticated abacus from around the 2nd century BCE known as the Chinese abacus).
In the 5th century BCE in ancient India, the grammarian Pāṇini formulated the grammar of Sanskrit in 3959 rules known as the Ashtadhyayi which was highly systematized and technical. Panini used metarules, transformations and recursions with such sophistication that his grammar had the computing power equivalent to a Turing machine.
Between 200 BCE and 400 CE, Jaina mathematicians in India invented the logarithm. From the 13th century, logarithmic tables were produced by Muslim mathematicians.
When John Napier discovered logarithms for computational purposes in the early 17th century, there followed a period of considerable progress by inventors and scientists in making calculating tools.
None of the early computational devices were really computers in the modern sense, and it took considerable advancement in mathematics and theory before the first modern computers could be designed.

Algorithms
In the 7th century, Indian mathematician Brahmagupta gave the first explanation of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and the use of zero as both a placeholder and a decimal digit.
Approximately around the year 825, Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi wrote a book, On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, that was principally responsible for the diffusion of the Indian system of numeration in the Middle East and then Europe. Around the 12th century, there was translation of this book written into Latin: Algoritmi de numero Indorum. These books presented newer concepts to perform a series of steps in order to accomplish a task such as the systematic application of arithmetic to algebra. By derivation from his name, we have the term algorithm.
Unfortunately…there are many claims from India. these articles need proofs and evidences.

Binary logic
Around the 3rd century BC, Indian mathematician Pingala invented the binary numeral system. In this system, still used today to process all modern computers, a sequence of ones and zeros can represent any number.
In 1703, Gottfried Leibniz developed logic in a formal, mathematical sense with his writings on the binary numeral system. In his system, the ones and zeros also represent true and false values or on and off states. But it took more than a century before George Boole published his Boolean algebra in 1854 with a complete system that allowed computational processes to be mathematically modeled.
By this time, the first mechanical devices driven by a binary pattern had been invented. The industrial revolution had driven forward the mechanization of many tasks, and this included weaving. Punch cards controlled Joseph Marie Jacquard’s loom in 1801, where a hole punched in the card indicated a binary one and an unpunched spot indicated a binary zero. Jacquard’s loom was far from being a computer, but it did illustrate that machines could be driven by binary systems.

The Analytical Engine
It wasn’t until Charles Babbage, considered the “father of computing,” that the modern computer began to take shape with his work on the Analytical Engine. The device, though never successfully built, had all of the functionality in its design of a modern computer. He first described it in 1837 — more than 100 years before any similar device was successfully constructed. The difference between Babbage’s Engine and preceding devices is simple – he designed his to be programmed.
During their collaboration, mathematician Ada Lovelace published the first ever computer programs in a comprehensive set of notes on the analytical engine. Because of this, Lovelace is popularly considered the first computer programmer, but some scholars contend that the programs published under her name were originally created by Babbage.

Birth of computer science
Before the 1920s, computers were human clerks that performed computations. They were usually under the lead of a physicist. Many thousands of computers were employed in commerce, government, and research establishments. Most of these computers were women, and they were known to have a degree in calculus. Some performed astronomical calculations for calendars.
After the 1920s, the expression computing machine referred to any machine that performed the work of a human computer, especially those in accordance with effective methods of the Church-Turing thesis. The thesis states that a mathematical method is effective if it could be set out as a list of instructions able to be followed by a human clerk with paper and pencil, for as long as necessary, and without ingenuity or insight.
Machines that computed with continuous values became known as the analog kind. They used machinery that represented continuous numeric quantities, like the angle of a shaft rotation or difference in electrical potential.
Digital machinery, in contrast to analog, were able to render a state of a numeric value and store each individual digit. Digital machinery used difference engines or relays before the invention of faster memory devices.
The phrase computing machine gradually gave away, after the late 1940s, to just computer as the onset of electronic digital machinery became common. These computers were able to perform the calculations that were performed by the previous human clerks.
Since the values stored by digital machines were not bound to physical properties like analog devices, a logical computer, based on digital equipment, was able to do anything that could be described “purely mechanical.” Alan Turing, known as the Father of Computer Science, invented such a logical computer known as the Turing Machine, which later evolved into the modern computer. These new computers were also able to perform non-numeric computations, like music.
From the time when computational processes were performed by human clerks, the study of computability began a science by being able to make evident which was not explicit into ordinary sense more immediate.

Emergence of a discipline

The theoretical groundwork
The mathematical foundations of modern computer science began to be laid by Kurt Gödel with his incompleteness theorem (1931). In this theorem, he showed that there were limits to what could be proved and disproved within a formal system. This led to work by Gödel and others to define and describe these formal systems, including concepts such as mu-recursive functions and lambda-definable functions.
1936 was a key year for computer science. Alan Turing and Alonzo Church independently, and also together, introduced the formalization of an algorithm, with limits on what can be computed, and a “purely mechanical” model for computing.
These topics are covered by what is now called the Church–Turing thesis, a hypothesis about the nature of mechanical calculation devices, such as electronic computers. The thesis claims that any calculation that is possible can be performed by an algorithm running on a computer, provided that sufficient time and storage space are available.
Turing also included with the thesis a description of the Turing machine. A Turing machine has an infinitely long tape and a read/write head that can move along the tape, changing the values along the way. Clearly such a machine could never be built, but nonetheless, the model can simulate the computation of any algorithm which can be performed on a modern computer.
Turing is so important to computer science that his name is also featured on the Turing Award and the Turing test. He contributed greatly to British code-breaking successes in the Second World War, and continued to design computers and software through the 1940s, but committed suicide in 1954.
At a symposium on large-scale digital machinery in Cambridge, Turing said, “We are trying to build a machine to do all kinds of different things simply by programming rather than by the addition of extra apparatus”.
In 1948, the first practical computer that could run stored programs, based on the Turing machine model, had been built – the Manchester Baby.
In 1950, Britain’s National Physical Laboratory completed Pilot ACE, a small scale programmable computer, based on Turing’s philosophy.

Shannon and information theory
Up to and during the 1930s, electrical engineers were able to build electronic circuits to solve mathematical and logic problems, but most did so in an ad hoc manner, lacking any theoretical rigor. This changed with Claude E. Shannon’s publication of his 1937 master’s thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits. While taking an undergraduate philosophy class, Shannon had been exposed to Boole’s work, and recognized that it could be used to arrange electromechanical relays (then used in telephone routing switches) to solve logic problems. This concept, of utilizing the properties of electrical switches to do logic, is the basic concept that underlies all electronic digital computers, and his thesis became the foundation of practical digital circuit design when it became widely known among the electrical engineering community during and after World War II.
Shannon went on to found the field of information theory with his 1948 paper entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which applied probability theory to the problem of how to best encode the information a sender wants to transmit. This work is one of the theoretical foundations for many areas of study, including data compression and cryptography.

Wiener and Cybernetics
From experiments with anti-aircraft systems that interpreted radar images to detect enemy planes, Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics from the Greek word for “steersman.” He published “Cybernetics” in 1948, which influenced artificial intelligence. Wiener also compared computation, computing machinery, memory devices, and other cognitive similarities with his analysis of brain waves.

The first computer bug
The first actual computer bug was a moth. It was stuck in between the relays on the Harvard Mark II.[1] While the invention of the term ‘bug’ is often but erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, who supposedly logged the “bug” on September 9, 1945, most other accounts conflict at least with these details. According to these accounts, the actual date was September 9, 1947 when operators filed this ‘incident’ — along with the insect and the notation “First actual case of bug being found” (see software bug for details).

Computer security

Computer security
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Computer security is a branch of technology known as information security as applied to computers. The objective of computer security varies and can include protection of information from theft or corruption, or the preservation of availability, as defined in the security policy.
Computer security imposes requirements on computers that are different from most system requirements because they often take the form of constraints on what computers are not supposed to do. This makes computer security particularly challenging because we find it hard enough just to make computer programs do everything they are designed to do correctly. Furthermore, negative requirements are deceptively complicated to satisfy and require exhaustive testing to verify, which is impractical for most computer programs. Computer security provides a technical strategy to convert negative requirements to positive enforceable rules. For this reason, computer security is often more technical and mathematical than some computer science fields.[citation needed]
Typical approaches to improving computer security (in approximate order of strength) can include the following:
* Physically limit access to computers to only those who will not compromise security.
* Hardware mechanisms that impose rules on computer programs, thus avoiding depending on computer programs for computer security.
* Operating system mechanisms that impose rules on programs to avoid trusting computer programs.
* Programming strategies to make computer programs dependable and resist subversion.

Secure operating systems
One use of the term computer security refers to technology to implement a secure operating system. Much of this technology is based on science developed in the 1980s and used to produce what may be some of the most impenetrable operating systems ever. Though still valid, the technology is in limited use today, primarily because it imposes some changes to system management and also because it is not widely understood. Such ultra-strong secure operating systems are based on operating system kernel technology that can guarantee that certain security policies are absolutely enforced in an operating environment. An example of such a Computer security policy is the Bell-LaPadula model. The strategy is based on a coupling of special microprocessor hardware features, often involving the memory management unit, to a special correctly implemented operating system kernel. This forms the foundation for a secure operating system which, if certain critical parts are designed and implemented correctly, can ensure the absolute impossibility of penetration by hostile elements. This capability is enabled because the configuration not only imposes a security policy, but in theory completely protects itself from corruption. Ordinary operating systems, on the other hand, lack the features that assure this maximal level of security. The design methodology to produce such secure systems is precise, deterministic and logical.
Systems designed with such methodology represent the state of the art of computer security although products using such security are not widely known. In sharp contrast to most kinds of software, they meet specifications with verifiable certainty comparable to specifications for size, weight and power. Secure operating systems designed this way are used primarily to protect national security information, military secrets, and the data of international financial institutions. These are very powerful security tools and very few secure operating systems have been certified at the highest level (Orange Book A-1) to operate over the range of “Top Secret” to “unclassified” (including Honeywell SCOMP, USAF SACDIN, NSA Blacker and Boeing MLS LAN.) The assurance of security depends not only on the soundness of the design strategy, but also on the assurance of correctness of the implementation, and therefore there are degrees of security strength defined for COMPUSEC. The Common Criteria quantifies security strength of products in terms of two components, security functionality and assurance level (such as EAL levels), and these are specified in a Protection Profile for requirements and a Security Target for product descriptions. None of these ultra-high assurance secure general purpose operating systems have been produced for decades or certified under the Common Criteria.
Secure operating systems designed to meet medium robustness levels of security functionality and assurance have seen wider use within both government and commercial markets. Medium robust systems typically provide nearly all of the security features of the most advanced secure operating systems but do so at a lower assurance level (such as EAL4 or EAL5). These systems are found in use on web servers, guards, database servers, and management hosts and are used not only to protect the data stored on these systems but also to provide a high level of protection for network connections and routing services.

Security architecture
Security Architecture can be defined as the design artifacts that describe how the security controls (security countermeasures) are positioned, and how they relate to the overall information technology architecture. These controls serve the purpose to maintain the system’s quality attributes, among them confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability and assurance.”[1]. In simpler words, a security architecture is the plan that shows where security measures need to be placed. If the plan describes a specific solution then, prior to building such a plan, one would make a risk analysis. If the plan describes a generic high level design then (reference architecture) then the plan should be based on a threat analysis.

Security by design
The technologies of computer security are based on logic. There is no universal standard notion of what secure behavior is. “Security” is a concept that is unique to each situation. Security is extraneous to the function of a computer application, rather than ancillary to it, thus security necessarily imposes restrictions on the application’s behavior.
There are several approaches to security in computing, sometimes a combination of approaches is valid:
1. Trust all the software to abide by a security policy but the software is not trustworthy (this is computer insecurity).
2. Trust all the software to abide by a security policy and the software is validated as trustworthy (by tedious branch and path analysis for example).
3. Trust no software but enforce a security policy with mechanisms that are not trustworthy (again this is computer insecurity).
4. Trust no software but enforce a security policy with trustworthy mechanisms.
Many systems have unintentionally resulted in the first possibility. Since approach two is expensive and non-deterministic, its use is very limited. Approaches one and three lead to failure. Because approach number four is often based on hardware mechanisms and avoids abstractions and a multiplicity of degrees of freedom, it is more practical. Combinations of approaches two and four are often used in a layered architecture with thin layers of two and thick layers of four.
There are myriad strategies and techniques used to design security systems. There are few, if any, effective strategies to enhance security after design.
One technique enforces the principle of least privilege to great extent, where an entity has only the privileges that are needed for its function. That way even if an attacker gains access to one part of the system, fine-grained security ensures that it is just as difficult for them to access the rest.
Furthermore, by breaking the system up into smaller components, the complexity of individual components is reduced, opening up the possibility of using techniques such as automated theorem proving to prove the correctness of crucial software subsystems. This enables a closed form solution to security that works well when only a single well-characterized property can be isolated as critical, and that property is also assessable to math. Not surprisingly, it is impractical for generalized correctness, which probably cannot even be defined, much less proven. Where formal correctness proofs are not possible, rigorous use of code review and unit testing represent a best-effort approach to make modules secure.
The design should use “defense in depth”, where more than one subsystem needs to be violated to compromise the integrity of the system and the information it holds. Defense in depth works when the breaching of one security measure does not provide a platform to facilitate subverting another. Also, the cascading principle acknowledges that several low hurdles does not make a high hurdle. So cascading several weak mechanisms does not provide the safety of a single stronger mechanism.
Subsystems should default to secure settings, and wherever possible should be designed to “fail secure” rather than “fail insecure” (see fail safe for the equivalent in safety engineering). Ideally, a secure system should require a deliberate, conscious, knowledgeable and free decision on the part of legitimate authorities in order to make it insecure.
In addition, security should not be an all or nothing issue. The designers and operators of systems should assume that security breaches are inevitable. Full audit trails should be kept of system activity, so that when a security breach occurs, the mechanism and extent of the breach can be determined. Storing audit trails remotely, where they can only be appended to, can keep intruders from covering their tracks. Finally, full disclosure helps to ensure that when bugs are found the “window of vulnerability” is kept as short as possible.

Early history of security by design
The early Multics operating system was notable for its early emphasis on computer security by design, and Multics was possibly the very first operating system to be designed as a secure system from the ground up. In spite of this, Multics’ security was broken, not once, but repeatedly. The strategy was known as ‘penetrate and test’ and has become widely known as a non-terminating process that fails to produce computer security. This led to further work on computer security that prefigured modern security engineering techniques producing closed form processes that terminate.

Secure coding
If the operating environment is not based on a secure operating system capable of maintaining a domain for its own execution, and capable of protecting application code from malicious subversion, and capable of protecting the system from subverted code, then high degrees of security are understandably not possible. While such secure operating systems are possible and have been implemented, most commercial systems fall in a ‘low security’ category because they rely on features not supported by secure operating systems (like portability, et al.). In low security operating environments, applications must be relied on to participate in their own protection. There are ‘best effort’ secure coding practices that can be followed to make an application more resistant to malicious subversion.
In commercial environments, the majority of software subversion vulnerabilities result from a few known kinds of coding defects. Common software defects include buffer overflows, format string vulnerabilities, integer overflow, and code/command injection.
Some common languages such as C and C++ are vulnerable to all of these defects (see Seacord, “Secure Coding in C and C++”). Other languages, such as Java, are more resistant to some of these defects, but are still prone to code/command injection and other software defects which facilitate subversion.
Recently another bad coding practice has come under scrutiny; dangling pointers. The first known exploit for this particular problem was presented in July 2007. Before this publication the problem was known but considered to be academic and not practically exploitable. [2]
In summary, ’secure coding’ can provide significant payback in low security operating environments, and therefore worth the effort. Still there is no known way to provide a reliable degree of subversion resistance with any degree or combination of ’secure coding.’

Capabilities vs. ACLs
Within computer systems, the two fundamental means of enforcing privilege separation are access control lists (ACLs) and capabilities. The semantics of ACLs have been proven to be insecure in many situations (e.g., Confused deputy problem). It has also been shown that ACL’s promise of giving access to an object to only one person can never be guaranteed in practice. Both of these problems are resolved by capabilities. This does not mean practical flaws exist in all ACL-based systems, but only that the designers of certain utilities must take responsibility to ensure that they do not introduce flaws.
Unfortunately, for various historical reasons, capabilities have been mostly restricted to research operating systems and commercial OSs still use ACLs. Capabilities can, however, also be implemented at the language level, leading to a style of programming that is essentially a refinement of standard object-oriented design. An open source project in the area is the E language.
First the Plessey System 250 and then Cambridge CAP computer demonstrated the use of capabilities, both in hardware and software, in the 1970s, so this technology is hardly new. A reason for the lack of adoption of capabilities may be that ACLs appeared to offer a ‘quick fix’ for security without pervasive redesign of the operating system and hardware.
The most secure computers are those not connected to the Internet and shielded from any interference. In the real world, the most security comes from operating systems where security is not an add-on, such as OS/400 from IBM. This almost never shows up in lists of vulnerabilities for good reason. Years may elapse between one problem needing remediation and the next.
A good example of a secure system is EROS. But see also the article on secure operating systems. TrustedBSD is an example of an open source project with a goal, among other things, of building capability functionality into the FreeBSD operating system. Much of the work is already done.

Applications
Computer security is critical in almost any technology-driven industry which operates on computer systems. The issues of computer based systems and addressing their countless vulnerabilities are an integral part of maintaining an operational industry. [3]

In aviation
The aviation industry is especially important when analyzing computer security because the involved risks include expensive equipment and cargo, transportation infrastructure and even human life. Security can be compromised by hardware and software malpractice, human error and faulty operating environments. Threats which exploit computer vulnerabilities can stem from sabotage, espionage, industrial competition, terrorist attack, mechanical malfunction and human error. [4]
The consequences of a successful intentional or accidental misuse of a computer system in the aviation industry range from loss of confidentiality to loss of system integrity, which may lead to more serious concerns, like data theft or loss, network and air traffic control outages, which can lead to airport closures, loss of aircraft or even death of passengers. Military systems which control munitions pose an even greater risk, one which is evident enough not to warrant a further explanation.
A proper attack does not need to be very high tech, or well funded, for a power outage at an airport alone can cause repercussions worldwide. [5]. One of the easiest and, arguably, the most difficult to trace security vulnerabilities is achievable by transmitting unauthorized communications over specific radio frequencies. These transmissions may spoof air traffic controllers or simply disrupt communications altogether. These incidents are very common, having altered flight courses of commercial aircraft and caused panic and confusion in the past. Controlling aircraft over oceans is especially dangerous because radar surveillance only extends 175 to 225 miles offshore. Beyond the radars’ sight, controllers must rely on periodic radio communications through a third party.
Lightning, power fluctuations, surges, brown-outs, blown fuses, and various other power outages instantly disable all computer systems, since they are dependent on electrical source. Other accidental and intentional faults have caused significant disruption of safety critical systems throughout the last few decades and dependence on reliable communication and electrical power only jeopardizes computer safety.

Notable system accidents
In 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 was shot down by Soviet SU-15 jets after a navigation computer malfunction caused the aircraft to steer 185 miles off course into Soviet Union airspace. All 269 passengers were killed. [6]
In 1994, over a hundred intrusions were made by unidentified hackers into the Rome Laboratory, the US Air Force’s main command and research facility. Using trojan horse viruses, hackers were able to obtain unrestricted access to Rome’s networking systems and remove traces of their activities. The intruders were able to obtain classified files, such as air tasking order systems data and furthermore able to penetrate connected networks of National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, some Defense contractors, and other private sector organizations, by posing as a trusted Rome center user. [7]
Electromagnetic interference is another threat to computer safety and in 1989, a United States Air Force F-16 jet accidentally dropped a 230 kg bomb in West Georgia after unspecified interference caused the jet’s computers to release it. [8]
A similar telecommunications accident also happened in 1994, when two UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters were destroyed by F-15 aircraft in Iraq because the IFF system’s encryption system malfunctioned.

Terminology
The following terms used in engineering secure systems are explained below.
* Firewalls can either be hardware devices or software programs. They provide some protection from online intrusion, but since they allow some applications (e.g. web browsers) to connect to the Internet, they don’t protect against some unpatched vulnerabilities in these applications (e.g. lists of known unpatched holes from Secunia and SecurityFocus).
* Automated theorem proving and other verification tools can enable critical algorithms and code used in secure systems to be mathematically proven to meet their specifications.
* Thus simple microkernels can be written so that we can be sure they don’t contain any bugs: eg EROS and Coyotos.
A bigger OS, capable of providing a standard API like POSIX, can be built on a secure microkernel using small API servers running as normal programs. If one of these API servers has a bug, the kernel and the other servers are not affected: e.g. Hurd or Minix 3.
* Cryptographic techniques can be used to defend data in transit between systems, reducing the probability that data exchanged between systems can be intercepted or modified.
* Strong authentication techniques can be used to ensure that communication end-points are who they say they are.
Secure cryptoprocessors can be used to leverage physical security techniques into protecting the security of the computer system.
* Chain of trust techniques can be used to attempt to ensure that all software loaded has been certified as authentic by the system’s designers.
* Mandatory access control can be used to ensure that privileged access is withdrawn when privileges are revoked. For example, deleting a user account should also stop any processes that are running with that user’s privileges.
* Capability and access control list techniques can be used to ensure privilege separation and mandatory access control. The next sections discuss their use.
Some of the following items may belong to the computer insecurity article:
* application with known security flaws should not be run. Either leave it turned off until it can be patched or otherwise fixed, or delete it and replace it with some other application. Publicly known flaws are the main entry used by worms to automatically break into a system and then spread to other systems connected to it. The security website Secunia provides a search tool for unpatched known flaws in popular products.
Cryptographic techniques involve transforming information, scrambling it so it becomes unreadable during transmission. The intended recipient can unscramble the message, but eavesdroppers cannot.
Cryptographic techniques involve transforming information, scrambling it so it becomes unreadable during transmission. The intended recipient can unscramble the message, but eavesdroppers cannot.
* Backups are a way of securing information; they are another copy of all the important computer files kept in another location. These files are kept on hard disks, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, and tapes. Suggested locations for backups are a fireproof, waterproof, and heat proof safe, or in a separate, offsite location than that in which the original files are contained. Some individuals and companies also keep their backups in safe deposit boxes inside bank vaults. There is also a fourth option, which involves using one of the file hosting services that backs up files over the Internet for both business and individuals.
o Backups are also important for reasons other than security. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or tornadoes, may strike the building where the computer is located. The building can be on fire, or an explosion may occur. There needs to be a recent backup at an alternate secure location, in case of such kind of disaster. Further, it is recommended that the alternate location be placed where the same disaster would not affect both locations. Examples of alternate disaster recovery sites being compromised by the same disaster that affects the primary site include having had a primary site in World Trade Center I and the recovery site in 7 World Trade Center, both of which were destroyed in the 9/11 attack, and having one’s primary site and recovery site in the same coastal region, which leads to both being vulnerable to hurricane damage (e.g. primary site in New Orleans and recovery site in Jefferson Parish, both of which were hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005). The backup media should be moved between the geographic sites in a secure manner, in order to prevent them from being stolen.
* Anti-virus software consists of computer programs that attempt to identify, thwart and eliminate computer viruses and other malicious software (malware).
* Firewalls are systems which help protect computers and computer networks from attack and subsequent intrusion by restricting the network traffic which can pass through them, based on a set of system administrator defined rules.
* Access authorization restricts access to a computer to group of users through the use of authentication systems. These systems can protect either the whole computer – such as through an interactive logon screen – or individual services, such as an FTP server. There are many methods for identifying and authenticating users, such as passwords, identification cards, and, more recently, smart cards and biometric systems.
* Encryption is used to protect the message from the eyes of others. It can be done in several ways by switching the characters around, replacing characters with others, and even removing characters from the message. These have to be used in combination to make the encryption secure enough, that is to say, sufficiently difficult to crack. Public key encryption is a refined and practical way of doing encryption. It allows for example anyone to write a message for a list of recipients, and only those recipients will be able to read that message.
* Intrusion-detection systems can scan a network for people that are on the network but who should not be there or are doing things that they should not be doing, for example trying a lot of passwords to gain access to the network.
* Pinging The ping application can be used by potential crackers to find if an IP address is reachable. If a cracker finds a computer they can try a port scan to detect and attack services on that computer.
* Social engineering awareness keeps employees aware of the dangers of social engineering and/or having a policy in place to prevent social engineering can reduce successful breaches of the network and servers.
* Honey pots are computers that are either intentionally or unintentionally left vulnerable to attack by crackers. They can be used to catch crackers or fix vulnerabilities.

Qur’an

Qur’an
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Qur’an (Arabic: القرآن al-qur’ān, literally “the recitation”; also sometimes transliterated as Qur’ān, Koran, Alcoran or Al-Qur’ān) is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind, and consider the original Arabic text to be the final revelation of God. Islam holds that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gibraele (Gabriel) over a period of 23 years. Muslims regard the Qur’an as the culmination of a series of divine messages that started with those revealed to Adam, regarded in Islam as the first prophet, and continued with the Suhuf-i-Ibrahim (Scrolls of Abraham), the Tawrat (Torah), the Zabur (Psalms), and the Injeel (Gospel). The aforementioned books are not explicitly included in the Qur’an, but are recognized therein. The Qur’an also refers to many events from Jewish and Christian scriptures, some of which are retold in comparatively distinctive ways from the Bible and the Torah, while obliquely referring to other events described explicitly in those texts.

The Qur’an itself expresses that it is the book of guidance. Therefore it rarely offers detailed accounts of historical events; the text instead typically placing emphasis on the moral significance of an event rather than its narrative sequence. It does not describe natural facts in a scientific manner but teaches that natural and supernatural events are signs of God.
The Qur’an was written down by Muhammad’s companions while he was alive, although the prime method of transmission was oral. It was compiled in the time of Abu Bakr, the first caliph, and was standardized in the time of Uthman, the third caliph. The Qur’an in its actual form is generally considered by academic scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad because the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance and that historically controversy over the content of the Qur’an has never become a main point. Therefore all Muslims, Sunni or Shia use the same Qur’an.

Etymology and meaning
The original usage of the word qur`ān is in the Qur’an itself, where it occurs about 70 times assuming various meanings. It is a verbal noun (maṣdar) of the Arabic verb qara`a (Arabic: قرأ), meaning “he read” or “he recited”, and represents the Syriac equivalent qeryānā which refers to “scripture reading” or “lesson”. While most Western scholars consider the word to be derived from the Syriac, the majority of Muslim authorities hold the origin of the word is qara`a itself. In any case, it had become an Arabic term by Muhammad’s lifetime. Among the earliest meanings of the word Qur’an is the “act of reciting”, for example in a Qur’anic passage: “Ours is it to put it together and [Ours is] its qur`ān”. In other verses it refers to “an individual passage recited [by Muhammad]“. In the large majority of contexts, usually with a definite article (al-), the word is referred to as the “revelation” (wahy), that which has been “sent down” (tanzīl) at intervals. Its liturgical context is seen in a number of passages, for example: “So when al-qur`ān is recited , listen to it and keep silent”. The word may also assume the meaning of a codified scripture when mentioned with other scriptures such as the Torah and Gospel.

The term also has closely related synonyms which are employed throughout the Qur’an. Each of the synonyms possess their own distinct meaning, but their use may converge with that of qur`ān in certain contexts. Such terms include kitāb (“book”); āyah (“sign”); and sūrah (“scripture”). The latter two terms also denote units of revelation. Other related words are: dhikr, meaning “remembrance,” used to refer to the Qur’an in the sense of a reminder and warning; and hikma, meaning “wisdom,” sometimes referring to the revelation or part of it.

The Qur’an has many other names. Among those found in the text itself are al-furqan (“discernment” or “criterion”), umm al-kitāb (the “mother book”, or “archetypal book”), al-huda (“the guide”), dhikrallah (“the remembrance of God”), al-hikmah (“the wisdom”), and kalamallah (“the word of God”). Another term is al-kitāb (“the book”), though it is also used in the Arabic language for other scriptures, such as the Torah and the Gospels. The term mus’haf (“written work”) is often used to refer to particular Qur’anic manuscripts but is also used in the Qur’an to identify earlier revealed books.

Structure
The Qur’an consists of 114 chapters of varying lengths, each known as a sura (pl. suar). Chapters are classed as Meccan or Medinan, depending on where the verses were revealed. Chapter titles are derived from a name or quality discussed in the text, or from the first letters or words of the sura. Muslims believe that Muhammad, on God’s command, gave the chapters their names.

Generally, longer chapters appear earlier in the Qur’an, while the shorter ones appear later. The chapter arrangement is thus not connected to the sequence of revelation. Each sura with the exception of one, commences with the Basmala.
Each sura is formed from several ayat (verses), which originally means a sign or portent sent by God. The number of ayat differ from sura to sura. An individual ayah may be just a few letters or several lines. The ayat are unlike the highly refined poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs in their content and distinctive rhymes and rhythms, being more akin to the prophetic utterances marked by inspired discontinuities found in the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. The actual number of ayat has been a controversial issue among Muslim scholars since Islam’s inception, some recognizing 6,000, some 6,204, some 6,219, and some 6,236, although the words in all cases are the same. The most popular edition of the Qur’an, which is based on the tradition of the school of Kufa, contains 6,236 ayat.
There is a crosscutting division into 30 parts, ajza, each containing two units called ahzab, each of which is divided into four parts (rub ‘al-ahzab). The Qur’an is also divided into seven stations (manazil)
The Qur’anic text seems to have no beginning, middle, or end, its nonlinear structure being akin to a web or net. Critics have commented on the textual arrangement pointing out lack of continuity, absence of any chronological or thematic order, and presence of repetition.

Literary structure
The Qur’an’s message is conveyed through the use of various literary structures and devices. In the original Arabic, the chapters and verses employ phonetic and thematic structures that assist the audience’s efforts to recall the message of the text. There is consensus among Arab scholars to use the Qur’an as a standard by which other Arabic literature should be measured. Muslims assert (in accordance with the Qur’an itself) that the Qur’anic content and style is inimitable.
Richard Gottheil and Siegmund Fränkel in the Jewish Encyclopedia write that the oldest portions of the Qur’an reflect significant excitement in their language, through short and abrupt sentences and sudden transitions. The Qur’an nonetheless carefully maintains the rhymed form, like the oracles. Some later portions also preserve this form but also in a style where the movement is calm and the style expository.
“The values presented in the very early Meccan revelations are repeated throughout the hymnic Suras. There is a sense of directness, of intimacy, as if the hearer were being asked repeatedly a simple question: what will be of value at the end of a human life?”
- Sells

Michael Sells, citing the work of the critic Norman O. Brown, acknowledges Brown’s observation that the seeming “disorganization” of Qur’anic literary expression — its “scattered or fragmented mode of composition,” in Sells’s phrase — is in fact a literary device capable of delivering “profound effects — as if the intensity of the prophetic message were shattering the vehicle of human language in which it was being communicated.” Sells also addresses the much-discussed “repetitiveness” of the Qur’an, seeing this, too, as a literary device.

Qur’an as a religious text
Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind and consider the text in its original Arabic to be the literal word of God, revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three years and view the Qur’an as God’s final revelation to humanity.

The Christian concept of revelation which means God incarnating and unveiling himself and become visible and audible for mankind is foreign to Islam. Wahy in Islamic and Qur’anic concept means the act of God addressing an individual, conveying a message for a greater number of recipients. The process by which the divine message comes to the heart of a messenger of God is tanzil (to send down) or nuzul (to come down). As the Qur’an says, “With the truth we (God) have sent it down and with the truth it has come down.” It designates positive religion, the letter of the revelation dictated by the angel to the prophet. It means to cause this revelation to descend from the higher world. According to hadith, the verses were sent down in special circumstances known as asbab al-nuzul. However, in this view God himself is never the subject of coming down.

The Qur’an frequently asserts in its text that it is divinely ordained, an assertion that Muslims believe. The Qur’an — often referring to its own textual nature and reflecting constantly on its divine origin — is the most meta-textual, self-referential religious text amongst all religious texts. The Qur’an refers to a written pre-text which records God’s speech even before it was sent down.

The issue of whether the Qur’an is eternal or created was one of the crucial controversies among early Muslim theologians. Mu’tazilis believe it is created while the most widespread varieties of Muslim theologians consider the Qur’an to be eternal and uncreated. Sufi philosophers view the question as artificial or wrongly framed.
“ And if ye are in doubt as to what We have revealed from time to time to Our servant, then produce a Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers (If there are any) besides God, if your (doubts) are true. But if ye cannot — and of a surety ye cannot — then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones, which is prepared for those who reject Faith. ”
—Qur’an 2:23-4 (Yusuf Ali)
Muslims maintain the present wording of the Qur’anic text corresponds exactly to that revealed to Muhammad himself: as the words of God, said to be delivered to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Muslims consider the Qur’an to be a guide, a sign of the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the religion. They argue it is not possible for a human to produce a book like the Qur’an, as the Qur’an itself maintains.
Therefore an Islamic philosopher introduces a prophetology to explain how the divine word passes into human expression. This leads to a kind of esoteric hermeneutics which seeks to comprehend the position of the prophet by mediating on the modality of his relationship not with his own time, but with the eternal source from which his message emanates. This view contrasts with historical critique of western scholars who attempt to understand the prophet through his circumstances, education and type of genius.

History of Qur’an
The Prophet era
According to hadith and Muslim history, after Muhammad emigrated to Medina and formed an independent Muslim community, he ordered a considerable number of the companions (sahaba) to recite the Qur’an and to learn and teach the laws which were being revealed daily. Companions who engaged in the recitation of the Qur’an were called qurra’. Since most sahaba were unable to read or write, they were ordered to learn from the prisoners-of-war the simple writing of the time. Thus a group of sahaba gradually became literate. As it was initially spoken, the Qur’an was recorded on tablets, bones and the wide flat end of date palm fronds. Most chapters were in use amongst early Muslims since they are mentioned in numerous sayings by both Sunni and Shia sources, relating Muhammad’s use of the Qur’an as a call to Islam, the making of prayer and the manner of recitation. However, the Qur’an did not exist in book form at the time of Muhammad’s death in 632.

Welch, a scholar of Islamic studies, states in the Encyclopedia of Islam that he believes the graphic descriptions of Muhammad’s condition at these moments may be regarded as genuine, seeing as he was severely disturbed after these revelations. According to Welch, these seizures would have been seen as convincing evidence for the superhuman origin of Muhammad’s inspirations by the people around him. Muhammad’s critics, however, accused him of being a possessed man, or of being a soothsayer or magician since his claimed experiences were similar to those made by such figures well known in ancient Arabia. Additionally, Welch states that it remains uncertain whether these experiences occurred before or after Muhammad began to see himself as a prophet.

The Qur’an states that Muhammad was ummi,[citation needed] interpreted as illiterate in Muslim tradition. According to Watt, the meaning of the Qur’anic term ummi is unscriptured rather than illiterate. Watt argues that a certain amount of writing was necessary for Muhammad to perform his commercial duties though it seems certain that he had not read any scriptures.

Making Mus’haf
According to Shia and some Sunni scholars, Ali compiled a complete version of the Qur’an mus’haf immediately after death of Muhammad. The order of this mus’haf differed from that gathered later during Uthman’s era. Despite this, Ali made no objection or resistance against standardized mus’haf, but kept his own book.

After seventy reciters were killed in the Battle of Yamama, the caliph Abu Bakr decided to collect the different chapters and verses into one volume. Thus, a group of reciters, including Zayd ibn Thabit, collected the chapters and verses and produced several hand-written copies of the complete book.
In about 650, as Islam expanded beyond the Arabian peninsula into Persia, the Levant and North Africa, the third caliph Uthman ibn Affan ordered the preparation of an official, standardized version, in order to preserve the sanctity of the text (and perhaps to keep the Rashidun Empire united). Five of the reciters from amongst the companions produced a unique text from the first volume which had been prepared on the orders of Abu Bakr and which was kept with Hafsa bint Umar. The other copies already in the hands of Muslims in other areas were collected and sent to Medina where, on orders of the Caliph, they were destroyed by burning or boiling. This remains the authoritative text of the Qur’an to this day.

The Qur’an in its present form is generally considered by academic scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad because the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance and that historically controversy over the content of the Qur’an has never become a main point. However, this consideration might also point to the

effectiveness of Uthman’s censorship.
Literary usage
In addition to and largely independent of the division into suar, there are various ways of dividing the Qur’an into parts of approximately equal length for convenience in reading, recitation and memorization. The thirty ajza can be used to read through the entire Qur’an in a week or a month. Some of these parts are known by names and these names are the first few words by which the juz’ starts. A juz’ is sometimes further divided into two ahzab, and each hizb subdivided into four rub ‘al-ahzab. A different structure is provided by the ruku’at, semantical units resembling paragraphs and comprising roughly ten ayat each. Some also divide the Qur’an into seven manazil to facilitate complete recitation in a week.
Recitation
“ …and recite the Qur’an in slow, measured rhythmic tones. ”
—Qur’an 73:4 (Yusuf Ali)
One meaning of Qur’an is “recitation”, the Qur’an itself outlining the general method of how it is to be recited: slowly and in rhythmic tones. Tajwid is the term for techniques of recitation, and assessed in terms of how accessible the recitation is to those intent on concentrating on the words.
To perform salat (prayer), a mandatory obligation in Islam, a Muslim is required to learn at least some suar of the Qur’an (typically starting with the first one, al-Fatiha, known as the “seven oft-repeated verses,” and then moving on to the shorter ones at the end). Until one has learned al-Fatiha, a Muslim can only say phrases like “praise be to God” during the salat.
A person whose recital repertoire encompasses the whole Qur’an is called a qari’, whereas a memoriser of the Qur’an is called a hafiz (fem. Hafaz) (which translate as “reciter” or “protector,” respectively). Muhammad is regarded as the first qari’ since he was the first to recite it. Recitation (tilawa تلاوة) of the Qur’an is a fine art in the Muslim world.

Schools of recitation
There are several schools of Qur’anic recitation, all of which are possible pronunciations of the Uthmanic rasm: Seven reliable, three permissible and (at least) four uncanonical – in 8 sub-traditions each – making for 80 recitation variants altogether.[54] A canonical recitation must satisfy three conditions:
1. It must match the rasm, letter for letter.
2. It must conform with the syntactic rules of the Arabic language.
3. It must have a continuous isnad to Muhammad through tawatur, meaning that it has to be related by a large group of people to another down the isnad chain.
These recitations differ in the vocalization (tashkil) of a few words, which in turn gives a complementary meaning to the word in question according to the rules of Arabic grammar. For example, the vocalization of a verb can change its active and passive voice. It can also change its stem formation, implying intensity for example. Vowels may be elongated or shortened, and glottal stops (hamzas) may be added or dropped, according to the respective rules of the particular recitation. For example, the name of archangel Gabriel is pronounced differently in different recitations: Jibrīl, Jabrīl, Jibra’īl, and Jibra’il. The name “Qur’an” is pronounced without the glottal stop (as “Qur’an”) in one recitation, and prophet Abraham’s name is pronounced Ibrāhām in another.[citation needed] The more widely used narrations are those of Hafss (حفص عن عاصم), Warsh (ورش عن نافع), Qaloon (قالون عن نافع) and Al-Duri according to Abu `Amr (الدوري عن أبي عمرو). Muslims firmly believe that all canonical recitations were recited by Muhammad himself, citing the respective isnad chain of narration, and accept them as valid for worshipping and as a reference for rules of Sharia. The uncanonical recitations are called “explanatory” for their role in giving a different perspective for a given verse or ayah. Today several dozen persons hold the title “Memorizer of the Ten Recitations.” This is considered a great accomplishment amongst Muslims.
The presence of these different recitations is attributed to many hadith. Malik Ibn Anas has reported:[55]
Abd al-Rahman Ibn Abd al-Qari narrated: “Umar Ibn Khattab said before me: I heard Hisham Ibn Hakim Ibn Hizam reading Surah Furqan in a different way from the one I used to read it, and the Prophet (sws) himself had read out this surah to me. Consequently, as soon as I heard him, I wanted to get hold of him. However, I gave him respite until he had finished the prayer. Then I got hold of his cloak and dragged him to the Prophet (sws). I said to him: “I have heard this person [Hisham Ibn Hakim Ibn Hizam] reading Surah Furqan in a different way from the one you had read it out to me.” The Prophet (sws) said: “Leave him alone [O 'Umar].” Then he said to Hisham: “Read [it].” [Umar said:] “He read it out in the same way as he had done before me.” [At this,] the Prophet (sws) said: “It was revealed thus.” Then the Prophet (sws) asked me to read it out. So I read it out. [At this], he said: “It was revealed thus; this Qur’an has been revealed in Seven Ahruf. You can read it in any of them you find easy from among them.
Suyuti, a famous 15th century Islamic theologian, writes after interpreting above hadith in 40 different ways:
” And to me the best opinion in this regard is that of the people who say that this hadith is from among matters of mutashabihat, the meaning of which cannot be understood. “
Many reports contradict the presence of variant readings:
* Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami reports, “the reading of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Zayd ibn Thabit and that of all the Muhajirun and the Ansar was the same. They would read the Qur’an according to the Qira’at al-’ammah. This is the same reading which was read out twice by the Prophet (sws) to Gabriel in the year of his death. Zayd ibn Thabit was also present in this reading [called] the ‘Ardah-i akhirah. It was this very reading that he taught the Qur’an to people till his death”.
* Ibn Sirin writes, “the reading on which the Qur’an was read out to the prophet in the year of his death is the same according to which people are reading the Qur’an today”.
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi also purports that there is only one recitation of Qur’an, which is called Qira’at of Hafss or in classical scholarship, it is called Qira’at al-’ammah. The Qur’an has also specified that it was revealed in the language of the prophet’s tribe: the Quraysh.[Qur'an 19:97][Qur'an 44:58])
However, the identification of the recitation of Hafss as the Qira’at al-’ammah is somewhat problematic when that was the recitation of the people of Kufa in Iraq, and there is better reason to identify the recitation of the reciters of Madinah as the dominant recitation. The reciter of Madinah was Nafi’ and Imam Malik remarked “The recitation of Nafi’ is Sunnah.” Moreover, the dialect of Arabic spoken by Quraysh and the Arabs of the Hijaz was known to have less use of the letter hamzah, as is the case in the recitation of Nafi’, whereas in the Hafs recitation the hamzah is one of the very dominant features.[citation needed]
AZ [however] says that the people of El-Hijaz and Hudhayl, and the people of Makkah and Al-Madinah, to not pronounce hamzah [at all]: and ‘Isa Ibn-’Omar says, Tamim pronounce hamzah, and the people of Al-Hijaz, in cases of necessity, [in poetry,] do so.
So the hamzah is of the dialect of the Najd whose people came to comprise the dominant Arabic element in Kufa giving some features of their dialect to their recitation, whereas the recitation of Nafi’ and the people of Madinah maintained some features of the dialect of Hijaz and the Quraysh.[citation needed]
However, the discussion of the priority of one or the other recitation is unnecessary since it is a consensus of knowledgable people that all of the seven recitations of the Qur’an are acceptable and valid for recitation in the prayer.[citation needed]
Moreover, the so-called “un-canonical” recitations such as are narrated from some of the Companions and which do not conform to the Uthmani copy of the Qur’an are not legitimate for recitation in the prayer, but knowledge of them can legitimately be used in the tafsir of the Qur’an, not as a proof but as a valid argument for an explanation of an ayah.[citation needed]

Writing and printing
Most Muslims today use printed editions of the Qur’an. There are many editions, large and small, elaborate or plain, expensive or inexpensive. Bilingual forms with the Arabic on one side and a gloss into a more familiar language on the other are very popular.
Qur’ans are produced in many different sizes. Most are of a reasonable book size, but there exist extremely large Qur’ans (usually for display purposes)[citation needed] and very small Qur’ans (sometimes given as gifts).[citation needed]
Qur’ans were first printed from carved wooden blocks, one block per page. There are existing specimen of pages and blocks dating from the 10th century AD. Mass-produced less expensive versions of the Qur’an were later produced by lithography, a technique for printing illustrations. Qur’ans so printed could reproduce the fine calligraphy of hand-made versions.[citations needed]
The oldest surviving Qur’an for which movable type was used was printed in Venice in 1537/1538. It seems to have been prepared for sale in the Ottoman empire. Catherine the Great of Russia sponsored a printing of the Qur’an in 1787. This was followed by editions from Kazan (1828), Persia (1833) and Istanbul (1877).
It is extremely difficult to render the full Qur’an, with all the points, in computer code, such as Unicode. The Internet Sacred Text Archive makes computer files of the Qur’an freely available both as images[62] and in a temporary Unicode version.[63] Various designers and software firms have attempted to develop computer fonts that can adequately render the Qur’an.
Before printing was widely adopted, the Qur’an was transmitted by copyists and calligraphers.[verification needed] Since Muslim tradition felt that directly portraying sacred figures and events might lead to idolatry, it was considered wrong to decorate the Qur’an with pictures (as was often done for Christian texts, for example). Muslims instead lavished love and care upon the sacred text itself. Arabic is written in many scripts, some of which are both complex and beautiful. Arabic calligraphy is a highly honored art, much like Chinese calligraphy. Muslims also decorated their Qur’ans with abstract figures (arabesques), colored inks, and gold leaf. Pages from some of these antique Qur’ans are displayed throughout this article.

Translations
Translation of the Qur’an has always been a problematic and difficult issue. Since Muslims revere the Qur’an as miraculous and inimitable (i’jaz al-Qur’an),[citation needed] they argue that the Qur’anic text can not be reproduced in another language or form. Furthermore, an Arabic word may have a range of meanings depending on the context, making an accurate translation even more difficult.
Nevertheless, the Qur’an has been translated into most African, Asian and European languages. The first translator of the Qur’an was Salman the Persian, who translated Fatihah into Persian during the 7th century. The first complete translation of Quran was into Persian during the reign of Samanids in the 9th century. Islamic tradition holds that translations were made for Emperor Negus of Abyssinia and Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, as both received letters by Muhammad containing verses from the Qur’an. In early centuries, the permissibility of translations was not an issue, but whether one could use translations in prayer.
In 1936, translations in 102 languages were known.
Robert of Ketton was the first person to translate the Qur’an into a Western language, Latin, in 1143.[67] Alexander Ross offered the first English version in 1649. In 1734, George Sale produced the first scholarly translation of the Qur’an into English; another was produced by Richard Bell in 1937, and yet another by Arthur John Arberry in 1955. All these translators were non-Muslims. There have been numerous translations by Muslims; the most popular of these are by Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan and Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al Hilali, Maulana Muhammad Ali, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, M. H. Shakir, Muhammad Asad and Marmaduke Pickthall.

The English translators have sometimes favored archaic English words and constructions over their more modern or conventional equivalents; for example, two widely-read translators, A. Yusuf Ali and M. Marmaduke Pickthall, use the plural and singular “ye” and “thou” instead of the more common “you.” Another common stylistic decision has been to refrain from translating “Allah” — in Arabic, literally, “The God” — into the common English word “God.” These choices may differ in more recent translations.

Levels of meaning
Shias and Sufis as well as some Muslim philosophers believe the meaning of the Qur’an to be not restricted to the literal aspect. The Qur’an also has inward aspects. Henry Corbin narrates a hadith that goes back to Muhammad:
“The Qur’an possesses an external appearance and a hidden depth, an exoteric meaning and an esoteric meaning. This esoteric meaning in turn conceals an esoteric meaning (this depth possesses a depth, after the image of the celestial Spheres which are enclosed within each other). So it goes on for seven esoteric meanings (seven depths of hidden depth).”

Commentaries dealing with the zahir (outward aspects) of the text are called tafsir, and hermeneutic and esoteric commentaries dealing with the batin are called ta’wil (“interpretation” or “explanation”), which involves taking the text back to its beginning. Esoteric commentators believe that the ultimate meaning of the Qur’an is known only to God.
In contrast, Qur’anic literalism which follows by Salafis and Zahiris is the belief that the Qur’an should be taken at its apparent meaning, rather than employing any sort of interpretation. This includes, for example, the belief that Allah has appendages such as hands as stated in the Qur’an; this is generally explained by the concept of bi-la kaifa, the claim that the literal meanings should be accepted without asking how or why.

Tafsir
The Qur’an has sparked a huge body of commentary and explication, known as tafsir. This commentary is aimed at explaining the “meanings of the Qur’anic verses, clarifying their import and finding out their significance.” and best tafseer is done by Allah himself.
Tafsir is one of the earliest academic activities of Muslims. According to the Qur’an, Muhammad was the first person who described the meanings of verses for early Muslims. Other early exegetes included a few Companions of Muhammad, like Ali ibn Abi Talib, Abdullah ibn Abbas, Abdullah ibn Umar and Ubayy ibn Kab. Exegesis in those days was confined to the explanation of literary aspects of the verse, the background of its revelation and, occasionally, interpretation of one verse with the help of the other. If the verse was about a historical event, then sometimes a few traditions (hadith) of Muhammad were narrated to make its meaning clear.

Because the Qur’an is spoken in classical Arabic, many of the later converts to Islam (mostly non-Arabs) did not always understand the Qur’anic Arabic, they did not catch allusions that were clear to early Muslims fluent in Arabic and they were concerned with reconciling apparent conflict of themes in the Qur’an. Commentators erudite in Arabic explained the allusions, and perhaps most importantly, explained which Qur’anic verses had been revealed early in Muhammad’s prophetic career, as being appropriate to the very earliest Muslim community, and which had been revealed later, canceling out or “abrogating” (nāsikh) the earlier text (mansukh). Memories of the occasions of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl), the circumstances under which Muhammad had spoken as he did, were also collected, as they were believed to explain some apparent obscurities.

Inward Aspects of the Qur’an
It is an essential idea for Shia as well as Sufi Muslims that the Qur’an has inward aspects too. They refer to several hadith of Muhammad such as
“The Qur’an possesses an external appearance and a hidden depth, an exoteric meaning and an esoteric meaning. This esoteric meaning in turn conceals an esoteric meaning (this depth possesses a depth, after the image of the celestial Spheres which are enclosed within each other). So it goes on for seven esoteric meanings (seven depths of hidden depth).”

According to this view, it has also become evident that the inner meaning of the Qur’an does not eradicate or invalidate its outward meaning. Rather, it is like the soul, which gives life to the body.
On the base of this viewpoint, Henry Corbin considers the Qur’an to have a part to play in Islamic philosophy, because gnosiology itself goes hand in hand with prophetology. However, it is clear that those who don’t believe in the divine origin of the Qur’an or any kind of sacred or spiritual existence completely oppose any inward aspect of the Qur’an.

Ta’wil
As Ja’far al-Kashfi has defined ta’wil means to lead back or to bring back something to its origin or archetype is a science whose pivot is a spiritual direction and a divine inspiration, while the tafsir is the literal exegesis of the letter; its pivot is the canonical Islamic sciences.[81] Allameh Tabatabaei says according to popular explanation among the later exegetes ta’wil indicates that particular meaning towards which the verse is directed. The meaning of revelation (tanzil), as opposed to ta’wil, is clear or according to the obvious meaning of the words as they were revealed. But this explanation has become so wide spread that, at present, it has become the real meaning of ta’wil, while originally this word meant “to return” or “the returning place”. In his view what has been rightly called ta’wil, or hermeneutic interpretation, of the Qur’an is not concerned simply with the denotation of words. Rather, it is concerned with certain truths and realities that transcend the comprehension of the common run of men; yet it is from these truths and realities that the principles of doctrine and the practical injunctions of the Qur’an issue forth. Interpretation is not the meaning of the verse; rather it transpires through that meaning – a special sort of transpiration. There is a spiritual reality which is the main objective of ordaining a law, or basic aim of describing a divine attribute; there is an actual significance to which a Qur’anic story refers.
However Shia and Sufism on one hand and Sunni on the other hand have completely different positions on its legitimacy. A verse in the Qur’an points out this issue, but Shia and Sunni disagree on how it should be read. According to Shia, those who are firmly rooted in knowledge like the Prophet and imams, know the secrets of Qur’an, while Sunnis believe just God knows it. According to Allameh Tabatabaei “none knows its interpretation except Allah”, remains valid, without any opposing or qualifying clause. Therefore, so far as this verse is concerned, the knowledge of the Qur’an’s interpretation is reserved for Allah. But he uses another verses and concludes those who are purified by God know the interpretation of the Qur’an to a certain extent.
The most ancient spiritual commentary on the Qur’an consists of the teachings which the Shia Imams propounded in the course of their conversations with their disciples. It was the principles of their spiritual hermeneutics that were subsequently to be brought together by the Sufis. These texts are narrated from Imam Ali and Ja’far al-Sadiq by Shia and Sunni Sufis.

As Corbin narrates from Shia sources, Ali himself gives this testimony:
Not a single verse of the Qur’an descended upon (was revealed to) the Messenger of God which he did not proceed to dictate to me and make me recite. I would write it with my own hand, and he would instruct me as to its tafsir (the literal explanation) and the ta’wil (the spiritual exegesis), the nasikh (the verse which abrogates) and the mansukh (the abrogated verse), the muhkam (without ambiguity) and the mutashabih (ambiguous), the particular and the general…

According to Allameh Tabatabaei, there are acceptable and unacceptable esoteric interpretations. Acceptable ta’wil refers to the meaning of a verse beyond its literal meaning; rather only the implicit, whose ultimate meaning is known only to God and can’t be comprehended directly through human thought alone. The verses in question here are those which refer to the human qualities of coming, going, sitting, satisfaction, anger and sorrow apparently attributed to God. Ta’wil that is unacceptable means “to transfer” the apparent meaning of a verse to a different meaning by means of a proof; this method is not without obvious inconsistencies. Although this view has gained considerable acceptance, it is incorrect and cannot be applied to the Qur’anic verses. The correct interpretation is that reality to which a verse refers; it is found in all verses, the decisive and the ambiguous alike; it is not a sort of a meaning of the word; it is a real fact that is too sublime for words; Allah has dressed them with words so as to bring them a bit nearer to our minds; in this respect they are like proverbs that are used to create a picture in the mind and thus help the hearer to clearly grasp the intended idea.
Therefore Sufi spiritual interpretations usually are accepted by Islamic scholars as authentic interpretations as long as certain conditions were met.[88] In Sufi history, these interpretations were sometimes considered religious innovations (bid’ah), as Salafis today believe. However, even among Shia, ta’wil is extremely controversial. For example, when Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, the leader of Islamic revolution, gave some lectures about Surat al-Fatiha in December 1979 and January 1980, some protests forced him to suspend it before he could proceed beyond the first two verses of the surah.

Relationship with other literature

The Torah and the Bible
“ It is He Who sent down to thee (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and He sent down the criterion (of judgment between right and wrong). ”
—Qur’an 3:3 (Yusuf Ali)
The Qur’an speaks well of the relationship it has with former books (the Torah and the Gospel) and attributes their similarities to their unique origin and saying all of them have been revealed by the one God.
The Qur’an retells stories of many of the people and events recounted in Jewish and Christian sacred books (Tanakh, Bible) and devotional literature (Apocrypha, Midrash), although it differs in many details. Adam, Enoch, Noah, Heber, Shelah, Abraham, Lot, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Jethro, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Aaron, Moses, Ezra, Zechariah, Jesus, and John the Baptist are mentioned in the Qur’an as prophets of God (see Prophets of Islam). Muslims believe the common elements or resemblances between the Bible and other Jewish and Christian writings and Islamic dispensations is due to their common divine source, and that the original Christian or Jewish texts were authentic divine revelations given to prophets.
Muslims believe that those texts were neglected, corrupted (tahrif) or altered in time by the Jews and Christians and have been replaced by God’s final and perfect revelation, which is the Qur’an. However, many Jews and Christians[who?] believe that the historical biblical archaeological record refutes this assertion, because the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Tanakh and other Jewish writings which predate the origin of the Qur’an) have been fully translated, validating the authenticity of the Greek Septuagint.

Influence of Christian apocrypha
The Diatessaron, Protoevangelium of James, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Arabic Infancy Gospel are all alleged to have been sources that the author/authors drew on when creating the Qur’an. The Diatessaron especially may have led to the misconception in the Qur’an that the Christian Gospel is one text. However this is strongly refuted by Muslim scholars, who maintain that the Qur’an is the divine word of God without any interpolation, and the similarities exist only due to the one source.
Arab writing
After the Qur’an, and the general rise of Islam, the Arabic alphabet developed rapidly into a beautiful and complex form of art.
Wadad Kadi, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago and Mustansir Mir, Professor of Islamic studies at Youngstown State University state that:
Although Arabic, as a language and a literary tradition, was quite well developed by the time of Muhammad’s prophetic activity, it was only after the emergence of Islam, with its founding scripture in Arabic, that the language reached its utmost capacity of expression, and the literature its highest point of complexity and sophistication. Indeed, it probably is no exaggeration to say that the Qur’an was one of the most conspicuous forces in the making of classical and post-classical Arabic literature.
The main areas in which the Qur’an exerted noticeable influence on Arabic literature are diction and themes; other areas are related to the literary aspects of the Qur’an particularly oaths (q.v.), metaphors, motifs, and symbols. As far as diction is concerned, one could say that Qur’anic words, idioms, and expressions, especially “loaded” and formulaic phrases, appear in practically all genres of literature and in such abundance that it is simply impossible to compile a full record of them. For not only did the Qur’an create an entirely new linguistic corpus to express its message, it also endowed old, pre-Islamic words with new meanings and it is these meanings that took root in the language and subsequently in the literature…

Qur’an miracles
Islamic scholars believe that the Qur’an is miraculous by its very nature in being a revealed text and that similar texts cannot be written by human endeavor. Its miraculous nature is claimed to be evidenced by its literary style, suggested similarities between Qur’anic verses and scientific facts discovered much later, and various prophecies. The Qur’an itself challenges those who deny its claimed divine origin to produce a text like it. [Qur'an 17:88][Qur'an 2:23][Qur'an 10:38]. These claims originate directly from Islamic belief in its revealed nature, and are widely disputed by non-muslim scholars of Islamic history.

Qur’anic Initials
14 different Arabic letters form 14 different sets of “Qur’anic Initials” (the “Muqatta’at”, such as A.L.M. of 2:1) and prefix 29 suras in the Qur’an. The meaning and interpretation of these initials is considered unknown to most Muslims. In 1974, Egyptian biochemist Rashad Khalifa claimed to have discovered a mathematical code based on the number 19, which is mentioned in Sura 74:30 of the Qur’an.

In culture
Most Muslims treat paper copies of the Qur’an with veneration, ritually washing before reading the Qur’an. Worn out, torn, or errant (for example, pages out of order) Qur’ans are not discarded as wastepaper, but rather are left free to flow in a river, kept somewhere safe, burnt, or buried in a remote location. Many Muslims memorize at least some portion of the Qur’an in the original Arabic, usually at least the verses needed to perform the prayers. Those who have memorized the entire Qur’an earn the right to the title of Hafiz.
Based on tradition and a literal interpretation of sura 56:77-79: “That this is indeed a Qur’an Most Honourable, In a Book well-guarded, Which none shall touch but those who are clean.”, many scholars opine that a Muslim perform wudu (ablution or a ritual cleansing with water) before touching a copy of the Qur’an, or mus’haf. This view has been contended by other scholars on the fact that, according to Arabic linguistic rules, this verse alludes to a fact and does not comprise an order. The literal translation thus reads as “That (this) is indeed a noble Qur’ān, In a Book kept hidden, Which none toucheth save the purified,” (translated by Mohamed Marmaduke Pickthall). It is suggested based on this translation that performing ablution is not required.
Qur’an desecration means insulting the Qur’an by defiling or dismembering it. Muslims must always treat the book with reverence, and are forbidden, for instance, to pulp, recycle, or simply discard worn-out copies of the text. Respect for the written text of the Qur’an is an important element of religious faith by many Muslims. They believe that intentionally insulting the Qur’an is a form of blasphemy.

Criticism
The Qur’an’s teachings on matters of war and peace have become topics of heated discussion in recent years. On the one hand, some critics interpret that certain verses of the Qur’an sanction military action against unbelievers as a whole both during the lifetime of Muhammad and after. On the other hand, other scholars argue that such verses of the Qur’an are interpreted out of context, and argue that when the verses are read in context it clearly appears that the Qur’an prohibits aggression, and allows fighting only in self defense.

Qur’an

Qur’an
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Qur’an (Arabic: القرآن al-qur’ān, literally “the recitation”; also sometimes transliterated as Qur’ān, Koran, Alcoran or Al-Qur’ān) is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind, and consider the original Arabic text to be the final revelation of God. Islam holds that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gibraele (Gabriel) over a period of 23 years. Muslims regard the Qur’an as the culmination of a series of divine messages that started with those revealed to Adam, regarded in Islam as the first prophet, and continued with the Suhuf-i-Ibrahim (Scrolls of Abraham), the Tawrat (Torah), the Zabur (Psalms), and the Injeel (Gospel). The aforementioned books are not explicitly included in the Qur’an, but are recognized therein. The Qur’an also refers to many events from Jewish and Christian scriptures, some of which are retold in comparatively distinctive ways from the Bible and the Torah, while obliquely referring to other events described explicitly in those texts.

The Qur’an itself expresses that it is the book of guidance. Therefore it rarely offers detailed accounts of historical events; the text instead typically placing emphasis on the moral significance of an event rather than its narrative sequence. It does not describe natural facts in a scientific manner but teaches that natural and supernatural events are signs of God.
The Qur’an was written down by Muhammad’s companions while he was alive, although the prime method of transmission was oral. It was compiled in the time of Abu Bakr, the first caliph, and was standardized in the time of Uthman, the third caliph. The Qur’an in its actual form is generally considered by academic scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad because the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance and that historically controversy over the content of the Qur’an has never become a main point. Therefore all Muslims, Sunni or Shia use the same Qur’an.

Etymology and meaning
The original usage of the word qur`ān is in the Qur’an itself, where it occurs about 70 times assuming various meanings. It is a verbal noun (maṣdar) of the Arabic verb qara`a (Arabic: قرأ), meaning “he read” or “he recited”, and represents the Syriac equivalent qeryānā which refers to “scripture reading” or “lesson”. While most Western scholars consider the word to be derived from the Syriac, the majority of Muslim authorities hold the origin of the word is qara`a itself. In any case, it had become an Arabic term by Muhammad’s lifetime. Among the earliest meanings of the word Qur’an is the “act of reciting”, for example in a Qur’anic passage: “Ours is it to put it together and [Ours is] its qur`ān”. In other verses it refers to “an individual passage recited [by Muhammad]“. In the large majority of contexts, usually with a definite article (al-), the word is referred to as the “revelation” (wahy), that which has been “sent down” (tanzīl) at intervals. Its liturgical context is seen in a number of passages, for example: “So when al-qur`ān is recited , listen to it and keep silent”. The word may also assume the meaning of a codified scripture when mentioned with other scriptures such as the Torah and Gospel.

The term also has closely related synonyms which are employed throughout the Qur’an. Each of the synonyms possess their own distinct meaning, but their use may converge with that of qur`ān in certain contexts. Such terms include kitāb (“book”); āyah (“sign”); and sūrah (“scripture”). The latter two terms also denote units of revelation. Other related words are: dhikr, meaning “remembrance,” used to refer to the Qur’an in the sense of a reminder and warning; and hikma, meaning “wisdom,” sometimes referring to the revelation or part of it.

The Qur’an has many other names. Among those found in the text itself are al-furqan (“discernment” or “criterion”), umm al-kitāb (the “mother book”, or “archetypal book”), al-huda (“the guide”), dhikrallah (“the remembrance of God”), al-hikmah (“the wisdom”), and kalamallah (“the word of God”). Another term is al-kitāb (“the book”), though it is also used in the Arabic language for other scriptures, such as the Torah and the Gospels. The term mus’haf (“written work”) is often used to refer to particular Qur’anic manuscripts but is also used in the Qur’an to identify earlier revealed books.

Structure
The Qur’an consists of 114 chapters of varying lengths, each known as a sura (pl. suar). Chapters are classed as Meccan or Medinan, depending on where the verses were revealed. Chapter titles are derived from a name or quality discussed in the text, or from the first letters or words of the sura. Muslims believe that Muhammad, on God’s command, gave the chapters their names.

Generally, longer chapters appear earlier in the Qur’an, while the shorter ones appear later. The chapter arrangement is thus not connected to the sequence of revelation. Each sura with the exception of one, commences with the Basmala.
Each sura is formed from several ayat (verses), which originally means a sign or portent sent by God. The number of ayat differ from sura to sura. An individual ayah may be just a few letters or several lines. The ayat are unlike the highly refined poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs in their content and distinctive rhymes and rhythms, being more akin to the prophetic utterances marked by inspired discontinuities found in the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. The actual number of ayat has been a controversial issue among Muslim scholars since Islam’s inception, some recognizing 6,000, some 6,204, some 6,219, and some 6,236, although the words in all cases are the same. The most popular edition of the Qur’an, which is based on the tradition of the school of Kufa, contains 6,236 ayat.
There is a crosscutting division into 30 parts, ajza, each containing two units called ahzab, each of which is divided into four parts (rub ‘al-ahzab). The Qur’an is also divided into seven stations (manazil)
The Qur’anic text seems to have no beginning, middle, or end, its nonlinear structure being akin to a web or net. Critics have commented on the textual arrangement pointing out lack of continuity, absence of any chronological or thematic order, and presence of repetition.

Literary structure
The Qur’an’s message is conveyed through the use of various literary structures and devices. In the original Arabic, the chapters and verses employ phonetic and thematic structures that assist the audience’s efforts to recall the message of the text. There is consensus among Arab scholars to use the Qur’an as a standard by which other Arabic literature should be measured. Muslims assert (in accordance with the Qur’an itself) that the Qur’anic content and style is inimitable.
Richard Gottheil and Siegmund Fränkel in the Jewish Encyclopedia write that the oldest portions of the Qur’an reflect significant excitement in their language, through short and abrupt sentences and sudden transitions. The Qur’an nonetheless carefully maintains the rhymed form, like the oracles. Some later portions also preserve this form but also in a style where the movement is calm and the style expository.
“The values presented in the very early Meccan revelations are repeated throughout the hymnic Suras. There is a sense of directness, of intimacy, as if the hearer were being asked repeatedly a simple question: what will be of value at the end of a human life?”
- Sells

Michael Sells, citing the work of the critic Norman O. Brown, acknowledges Brown’s observation that the seeming “disorganization” of Qur’anic literary expression — its “scattered or fragmented mode of composition,” in Sells’s phrase — is in fact a literary device capable of delivering “profound effects — as if the intensity of the prophetic message were shattering the vehicle of human language in which it was being communicated.” Sells also addresses the much-discussed “repetitiveness” of the Qur’an, seeing this, too, as a literary device.

Qur’an as a religious text
Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind and consider the text in its original Arabic to be the literal word of God, revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three years and view the Qur’an as God’s final revelation to humanity.

The Christian concept of revelation which means God incarnating and unveiling himself and become visible and audible for mankind is foreign to Islam. Wahy in Islamic and Qur’anic concept means the act of God addressing an individual, conveying a message for a greater number of recipients. The process by which the divine message comes to the heart of a messenger of God is tanzil (to send down) or nuzul (to come down). As the Qur’an says, “With the truth we (God) have sent it down and with the truth it has come down.” It designates positive religion, the letter of the revelation dictated by the angel to the prophet. It means to cause this revelation to descend from the higher world. According to hadith, the verses were sent down in special circumstances known as asbab al-nuzul. However, in this view God himself is never the subject of coming down.

The Qur’an frequently asserts in its text that it is divinely ordained, an assertion that Muslims believe. The Qur’an — often referring to its own textual nature and reflecting constantly on its divine origin — is the most meta-textual, self-referential religious text amongst all religious texts. The Qur’an refers to a written pre-text which records God’s speech even before it was sent down.

The issue of whether the Qur’an is eternal or created was one of the crucial controversies among early Muslim theologians. Mu’tazilis believe it is created while the most widespread varieties of Muslim theologians consider the Qur’an to be eternal and uncreated. Sufi philosophers view the question as artificial or wrongly framed.
“ And if ye are in doubt as to what We have revealed from time to time to Our servant, then produce a Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers (If there are any) besides God, if your (doubts) are true. But if ye cannot — and of a surety ye cannot — then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones, which is prepared for those who reject Faith. ”
—Qur’an 2:23-4 (Yusuf Ali)
Muslims maintain the present wording of the Qur’anic text corresponds exactly to that revealed to Muhammad himself: as the words of God, said to be delivered to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Muslims consider the Qur’an to be a guide, a sign of the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the religion. They argue it is not possible for a human to produce a book like the Qur’an, as the Qur’an itself maintains.
Therefore an Islamic philosopher introduces a prophetology to explain how the divine word passes into human expression. This leads to a kind of esoteric hermeneutics which seeks to comprehend the position of the prophet by mediating on the modality of his relationship not with his own time, but with the eternal source from which his message emanates. This view contrasts with historical critique of western scholars who attempt to understand the prophet through his circumstances, education and type of genius.

History of Qur’an
The Prophet era
According to hadith and Muslim history, after Muhammad emigrated to Medina and formed an independent Muslim community, he ordered a considerable number of the companions (sahaba) to recite the Qur’an and to learn and teach the laws which were being revealed daily. Companions who engaged in the recitation of the Qur’an were called qurra’. Since most sahaba were unable to read or write, they were ordered to learn from the prisoners-of-war the simple writing of the time. Thus a group of sahaba gradually became literate. As it was initially spoken, the Qur’an was recorded on tablets, bones and the wide flat end of date palm fronds. Most chapters were in use amongst early Muslims since they are mentioned in numerous sayings by both Sunni and Shia sources, relating Muhammad’s use of the Qur’an as a call to Islam, the making of prayer and the manner of recitation. However, the Qur’an did not exist in book form at the time of Muhammad’s death in 632.

Welch, a scholar of Islamic studies, states in the Encyclopedia of Islam that he believes the graphic descriptions of Muhammad’s condition at these moments may be regarded as genuine, seeing as he was severely disturbed after these revelations. According to Welch, these seizures would have been seen as convincing evidence for the superhuman origin of Muhammad’s inspirations by the people around him. Muhammad’s critics, however, accused him of being a possessed man, or of being a soothsayer or magician since his claimed experiences were similar to those made by such figures well known in ancient Arabia. Additionally, Welch states that it remains uncertain whether these experiences occurred before or after Muhammad began to see himself as a prophet.

The Qur’an states that Muhammad was ummi,[citation needed] interpreted as illiterate in Muslim tradition. According to Watt, the meaning of the Qur’anic term ummi is unscriptured rather than illiterate. Watt argues that a certain amount of writing was necessary for Muhammad to perform his commercial duties though it seems certain that he had not read any scriptures.

Making Mus’haf
According to Shia and some Sunni scholars, Ali compiled a complete version of the Qur’an mus’haf immediately after death of Muhammad. The order of this mus’haf differed from that gathered later during Uthman’s era. Despite this, Ali made no objection or resistance against standardized mus’haf, but kept his own book.

After seventy reciters were killed in the Battle of Yamama, the caliph Abu Bakr decided to collect the different chapters and verses into one volume. Thus, a group of reciters, including Zayd ibn Thabit, collected the chapters and verses and produced several hand-written copies of the complete book.
In about 650, as Islam expanded beyond the Arabian peninsula into Persia, the Levant and North Africa, the third caliph Uthman ibn Affan ordered the preparation of an official, standardized version, in order to preserve the sanctity of the text (and perhaps to keep the Rashidun Empire united). Five of the reciters from amongst the companions produced a unique text from the first volume which had been prepared on the orders of Abu Bakr and which was kept with Hafsa bint Umar. The other copies already in the hands of Muslims in other areas were collected and sent to Medina where, on orders of the Caliph, they were destroyed by burning or boiling. This remains the authoritative text of the Qur’an to this day.

The Qur’an in its present form is generally considered by academic scholars to record the words spoken by Muhammad because the search for variants in Western academia has not yielded any differences of great significance and that historically controversy over the content of the Qur’an has never become a main point. However, this consideration might also point to the

effectiveness of Uthman’s censorship.
Literary usage
In addition to and largely independent of the division into suar, there are various ways of dividing the Qur’an into parts of approximately equal length for convenience in reading, recitation and memorization. The thirty ajza can be used to read through the entire Qur’an in a week or a month. Some of these parts are known by names and these names are the first few words by which the juz’ starts. A juz’ is sometimes further divided into two ahzab, and each hizb subdivided into four rub ‘al-ahzab. A different structure is provided by the ruku’at, semantical units resembling paragraphs and comprising roughly ten ayat each. Some also divide the Qur’an into seven manazil to facilitate complete recitation in a week.
Recitation
“ …and recite the Qur’an in slow, measured rhythmic tones. ”
—Qur’an 73:4 (Yusuf Ali)
One meaning of Qur’an is “recitation”, the Qur’an itself outlining the general method of how it is to be recited: slowly and in rhythmic tones. Tajwid is the term for techniques of recitation, and assessed in terms of how accessible the recitation is to those intent on concentrating on the words.
To perform salat (prayer), a mandatory obligation in Islam, a Muslim is required to learn at least some suar of the Qur’an (typically starting with the first one, al-Fatiha, known as the “seven oft-repeated verses,” and then moving on to the shorter ones at the end). Until one has learned al-Fatiha, a Muslim can only say phrases like “praise be to God” during the salat.
A person whose recital repertoire encompasses the whole Qur’an is called a qari’, whereas a memoriser of the Qur’an is called a hafiz (fem. Hafaz) (which translate as “reciter” or “protector,” respectively). Muhammad is regarded as the first qari’ since he was the first to recite it. Recitation (tilawa تلاوة) of the Qur’an is a fine art in the Muslim world.

Schools of recitation
There are several schools of Qur’anic recitation, all of which are possible pronunciations of the Uthmanic rasm: Seven reliable, three permissible and (at least) four uncanonical – in 8 sub-traditions each – making for 80 recitation variants altogether.[54] A canonical recitation must satisfy three conditions:
1. It must match the rasm, letter for letter.
2. It must conform with the syntactic rules of the Arabic language.
3. It must have a continuous isnad to Muhammad through tawatur, meaning that it has to be related by a large group of people to another down the isnad chain.
These recitations differ in the vocalization (tashkil) of a few words, which in turn gives a complementary meaning to the word in question according to the rules of Arabic grammar. For example, the vocalization of a verb can change its active and passive voice. It can also change its stem formation, implying intensity for example. Vowels may be elongated or shortened, and glottal stops (hamzas) may be added or dropped, according to the respective rules of the particular recitation. For example, the name of archangel Gabriel is pronounced differently in different recitations: Jibrīl, Jabrīl, Jibra’īl, and Jibra’il. The name “Qur’an” is pronounced without the glottal stop (as “Qur’an”) in one recitation, and prophet Abraham’s name is pronounced Ibrāhām in another.[citation needed] The more widely used narrations are those of Hafss (حفص عن عاصم), Warsh (ورش عن نافع), Qaloon (قالون عن نافع) and Al-Duri according to Abu `Amr (الدوري عن أبي عمرو). Muslims firmly believe that all canonical recitations were recited by Muhammad himself, citing the respective isnad chain of narration, and accept them as valid for worshipping and as a reference for rules of Sharia. The uncanonical recitations are called “explanatory” for their role in giving a different perspective for a given verse or ayah. Today several dozen persons hold the title “Memorizer of the Ten Recitations.” This is considered a great accomplishment amongst Muslims.
The presence of these different recitations is attributed to many hadith. Malik Ibn Anas has reported:[55]
Abd al-Rahman Ibn Abd al-Qari narrated: “Umar Ibn Khattab said before me: I heard Hisham Ibn Hakim Ibn Hizam reading Surah Furqan in a different way from the one I used to read it, and the Prophet (sws) himself had read out this surah to me. Consequently, as soon as I heard him, I wanted to get hold of him. However, I gave him respite until he had finished the prayer. Then I got hold of his cloak and dragged him to the Prophet (sws). I said to him: “I have heard this person [Hisham Ibn Hakim Ibn Hizam] reading Surah Furqan in a different way from the one you had read it out to me.” The Prophet (sws) said: “Leave him alone [O 'Umar].” Then he said to Hisham: “Read [it].” [Umar said:] “He read it out in the same way as he had done before me.” [At this,] the Prophet (sws) said: “It was revealed thus.” Then the Prophet (sws) asked me to read it out. So I read it out. [At this], he said: “It was revealed thus; this Qur’an has been revealed in Seven Ahruf. You can read it in any of them you find easy from among them.
Suyuti, a famous 15th century Islamic theologian, writes after interpreting above hadith in 40 different ways:
” And to me the best opinion in this regard is that of the people who say that this hadith is from among matters of mutashabihat, the meaning of which cannot be understood. “
Many reports contradict the presence of variant readings:
* Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami reports, “the reading of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Zayd ibn Thabit and that of all the Muhajirun and the Ansar was the same. They would read the Qur’an according to the Qira’at al-’ammah. This is the same reading which was read out twice by the Prophet (sws) to Gabriel in the year of his death. Zayd ibn Thabit was also present in this reading [called] the ‘Ardah-i akhirah. It was this very reading that he taught the Qur’an to people till his death”.
* Ibn Sirin writes, “the reading on which the Qur’an was read out to the prophet in the year of his death is the same according to which people are reading the Qur’an today”.
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi also purports that there is only one recitation of Qur’an, which is called Qira’at of Hafss or in classical scholarship, it is called Qira’at al-’ammah. The Qur’an has also specified that it was revealed in the language of the prophet’s tribe: the Quraysh.[Qur'an 19:97][Qur'an 44:58])
However, the identification of the recitation of Hafss as the Qira’at al-’ammah is somewhat problematic when that was the recitation of the people of Kufa in Iraq, and there is better reason to identify the recitation of the reciters of Madinah as the dominant recitation. The reciter of Madinah was Nafi’ and Imam Malik remarked “The recitation of Nafi’ is Sunnah.” Moreover, the dialect of Arabic spoken by Quraysh and the Arabs of the Hijaz was known to have less use of the letter hamzah, as is the case in the recitation of Nafi’, whereas in the Hafs recitation the hamzah is one of the very dominant features.[citation needed]
AZ [however] says that the people of El-Hijaz and Hudhayl, and the people of Makkah and Al-Madinah, to not pronounce hamzah [at all]: and ‘Isa Ibn-’Omar says, Tamim pronounce hamzah, and the people of Al-Hijaz, in cases of necessity, [in poetry,] do so.
So the hamzah is of the dialect of the Najd whose people came to comprise the dominant Arabic element in Kufa giving some features of their dialect to their recitation, whereas the recitation of Nafi’ and the people of Madinah maintained some features of the dialect of Hijaz and the Quraysh.[citation needed]
However, the discussion of the priority of one or the other recitation is unnecessary since it is a consensus of knowledgable people that all of the seven recitations of the Qur’an are acceptable and valid for recitation in the prayer.[citation needed]
Moreover, the so-called “un-canonical” recitations such as are narrated from some of the Companions and which do not conform to the Uthmani copy of the Qur’an are not legitimate for recitation in the prayer, but knowledge of them can legitimately be used in the tafsir of the Qur’an, not as a proof but as a valid argument for an explanation of an ayah.[citation needed]

Writing and printing
Most Muslims today use printed editions of the Qur’an. There are many editions, large and small, elaborate or plain, expensive or inexpensive. Bilingual forms with the Arabic on one side and a gloss into a more familiar language on the other are very popular.
Qur’ans are produced in many different sizes. Most are of a reasonable book size, but there exist extremely large Qur’ans (usually for display purposes)[citation needed] and very small Qur’ans (sometimes given as gifts).[citation needed]
Qur’ans were first printed from carved wooden blocks, one block per page. There are existing specimen of pages and blocks dating from the 10th century AD. Mass-produced less expensive versions of the Qur’an were later produced by lithography, a technique for printing illustrations. Qur’ans so printed could reproduce the fine calligraphy of hand-made versions.[citations needed]
The oldest surviving Qur’an for which movable type was used was printed in Venice in 1537/1538. It seems to have been prepared for sale in the Ottoman empire. Catherine the Great of Russia sponsored a printing of the Qur’an in 1787. This was followed by editions from Kazan (1828), Persia (1833) and Istanbul (1877).
It is extremely difficult to render the full Qur’an, with all the points, in computer code, such as Unicode. The Internet Sacred Text Archive makes computer files of the Qur’an freely available both as images[62] and in a temporary Unicode version.[63] Various designers and software firms have attempted to develop computer fonts that can adequately render the Qur’an.
Before printing was widely adopted, the Qur’an was transmitted by copyists and calligraphers.[verification needed] Since Muslim tradition felt that directly portraying sacred figures and events might lead to idolatry, it was considered wrong to decorate the Qur’an with pictures (as was often done for Christian texts, for example). Muslims instead lavished love and care upon the sacred text itself. Arabic is written in many scripts, some of which are both complex and beautiful. Arabic calligraphy is a highly honored art, much like Chinese calligraphy. Muslims also decorated their Qur’ans with abstract figures (arabesques), colored inks, and gold leaf. Pages from some of these antique Qur’ans are displayed throughout this article.

Translations
Translation of the Qur’an has always been a problematic and difficult issue. Since Muslims revere the Qur’an as miraculous and inimitable (i’jaz al-Qur’an),[citation needed] they argue that the Qur’anic text can not be reproduced in another language or form. Furthermore, an Arabic word may have a range of meanings depending on the context, making an accurate translation even more difficult.
Nevertheless, the Qur’an has been translated into most African, Asian and European languages. The first translator of the Qur’an was Salman the Persian, who translated Fatihah into Persian during the 7th century. The first complete translation of Quran was into Persian during the reign of Samanids in the 9th century. Islamic tradition holds that translations were made for Emperor Negus of Abyssinia and Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, as both received letters by Muhammad containing verses from the Qur’an. In early centuries, the permissibility of translations was not an issue, but whether one could use translations in prayer.
In 1936, translations in 102 languages were known.
Robert of Ketton was the first person to translate the Qur’an into a Western language, Latin, in 1143.[67] Alexander Ross offered the first English version in 1649. In 1734, George Sale produced the first scholarly translation of the Qur’an into English; another was produced by Richard Bell in 1937, and yet another by Arthur John Arberry in 1955. All these translators were non-Muslims. There have been numerous translations by Muslims; the most popular of these are by Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan and Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al Hilali, Maulana Muhammad Ali, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, M. H. Shakir, Muhammad Asad and Marmaduke Pickthall.

The English translators have sometimes favored archaic English words and constructions over their more modern or conventional equivalents; for example, two widely-read translators, A. Yusuf Ali and M. Marmaduke Pickthall, use the plural and singular “ye” and “thou” instead of the more common “you.” Another common stylistic decision has been to refrain from translating “Allah” — in Arabic, literally, “The God” — into the common English word “God.” These choices may differ in more recent translations.

Levels of meaning
Shias and Sufis as well as some Muslim philosophers believe the meaning of the Qur’an to be not restricted to the literal aspect. The Qur’an also has inward aspects. Henry Corbin narrates a hadith that goes back to Muhammad:
“The Qur’an possesses an external appearance and a hidden depth, an exoteric meaning and an esoteric meaning. This esoteric meaning in turn conceals an esoteric meaning (this depth possesses a depth, after the image of the celestial Spheres which are enclosed within each other). So it goes on for seven esoteric meanings (seven depths of hidden depth).”

Commentaries dealing with the zahir (outward aspects) of the text are called tafsir, and hermeneutic and esoteric commentaries dealing with the batin are called ta’wil (“interpretation” or “explanation”), which involves taking the text back to its beginning. Esoteric commentators believe that the ultimate meaning of the Qur’an is known only to God.
In contrast, Qur’anic literalism which follows by Salafis and Zahiris is the belief that the Qur’an should be taken at its apparent meaning, rather than employing any sort of interpretation. This includes, for example, the belief that Allah has appendages such as hands as stated in the Qur’an; this is generally explained by the concept of bi-la kaifa, the claim that the literal meanings should be accepted without asking how or why.

Tafsir
The Qur’an has sparked a huge body of commentary and explication, known as tafsir. This commentary is aimed at explaining the “meanings of the Qur’anic verses, clarifying their import and finding out their significance.” and best tafseer is done by Allah himself.
Tafsir is one of the earliest academic activities of Muslims. According to the Qur’an, Muhammad was the first person who described the meanings of verses for early Muslims. Other early exegetes included a few Companions of Muhammad, like Ali ibn Abi Talib, Abdullah ibn Abbas, Abdullah ibn Umar and Ubayy ibn Kab. Exegesis in those days was confined to the explanation of literary aspects of the verse, the background of its revelation and, occasionally, interpretation of one verse with the help of the other. If the verse was about a historical event, then sometimes a few traditions (hadith) of Muhammad were narrated to make its meaning clear.

Because the Qur’an is spoken in classical Arabic, many of the later converts to Islam (mostly non-Arabs) did not always understand the Qur’anic Arabic, they did not catch allusions that were clear to early Muslims fluent in Arabic and they were concerned with reconciling apparent conflict of themes in the Qur’an. Commentators erudite in Arabic explained the allusions, and perhaps most importantly, explained which Qur’anic verses had been revealed early in Muhammad’s prophetic career, as being appropriate to the very earliest Muslim community, and which had been revealed later, canceling out or “abrogating” (nāsikh) the earlier text (mansukh). Memories of the occasions of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl), the circumstances under which Muhammad had spoken as he did, were also collected, as they were believed to explain some apparent obscurities.

Inward Aspects of the Qur’an
It is an essential idea for Shia as well as Sufi Muslims that the Qur’an has inward aspects too. They refer to several hadith of Muhammad such as
“The Qur’an possesses an external appearance and a hidden depth, an exoteric meaning and an esoteric meaning. This esoteric meaning in turn conceals an esoteric meaning (this depth possesses a depth, after the image of the celestial Spheres which are enclosed within each other). So it goes on for seven esoteric meanings (seven depths of hidden depth).”

According to this view, it has also become evident that the inner meaning of the Qur’an does not eradicate or invalidate its outward meaning. Rather, it is like the soul, which gives life to the body.
On the base of this viewpoint, Henry Corbin considers the Qur’an to have a part to play in Islamic philosophy, because gnosiology itself goes hand in hand with prophetology. However, it is clear that those who don’t believe in the divine origin of the Qur’an or any kind of sacred or spiritual existence completely oppose any inward aspect of the Qur’an.

Ta’wil
As Ja’far al-Kashfi has defined ta’wil means to lead back or to bring back something to its origin or archetype is a science whose pivot is a spiritual direction and a divine inspiration, while the tafsir is the literal exegesis of the letter; its pivot is the canonical Islamic sciences.[81] Allameh Tabatabaei says according to popular explanation among the later exegetes ta’wil indicates that particular meaning towards which the verse is directed. The meaning of revelation (tanzil), as opposed to ta’wil, is clear or according to the obvious meaning of the words as they were revealed. But this explanation has become so wide spread that, at present, it has become the real meaning of ta’wil, while originally this word meant “to return” or “the returning place”. In his view what has been rightly called ta’wil, or hermeneutic interpretation, of the Qur’an is not concerned simply with the denotation of words. Rather, it is concerned with certain truths and realities that transcend the comprehension of the common run of men; yet it is from these truths and realities that the principles of doctrine and the practical injunctions of the Qur’an issue forth. Interpretation is not the meaning of the verse; rather it transpires through that meaning – a special sort of transpiration. There is a spiritual reality which is the main objective of ordaining a law, or basic aim of describing a divine attribute; there is an actual significance to which a Qur’anic story refers.
However Shia and Sufism on one hand and Sunni on the other hand have completely different positions on its legitimacy. A verse in the Qur’an points out this issue, but Shia and Sunni disagree on how it should be read. According to Shia, those who are firmly rooted in knowledge like the Prophet and imams, know the secrets of Qur’an, while Sunnis believe just God knows it. According to Allameh Tabatabaei “none knows its interpretation except Allah”, remains valid, without any opposing or qualifying clause. Therefore, so far as this verse is concerned, the knowledge of the Qur’an’s interpretation is reserved for Allah. But he uses another verses and concludes those who are purified by God know the interpretation of the Qur’an to a certain extent.
The most ancient spiritual commentary on the Qur’an consists of the teachings which the Shia Imams propounded in the course of their conversations with their disciples. It was the principles of their spiritual hermeneutics that were subsequently to be brought together by the Sufis. These texts are narrated from Imam Ali and Ja’far al-Sadiq by Shia and Sunni Sufis.

As Corbin narrates from Shia sources, Ali himself gives this testimony:
Not a single verse of the Qur’an descended upon (was revealed to) the Messenger of God which he did not proceed to dictate to me and make me recite. I would write it with my own hand, and he would instruct me as to its tafsir (the literal explanation) and the ta’wil (the spiritual exegesis), the nasikh (the verse which abrogates) and the mansukh (the abrogated verse), the muhkam (without ambiguity) and the mutashabih (ambiguous), the particular and the general…

According to Allameh Tabatabaei, there are acceptable and unacceptable esoteric interpretations. Acceptable ta’wil refers to the meaning of a verse beyond its literal meaning; rather only the implicit, whose ultimate meaning is known only to God and can’t be comprehended directly through human thought alone. The verses in question here are those which refer to the human qualities of coming, going, sitting, satisfaction, anger and sorrow apparently attributed to God. Ta’wil that is unacceptable means “to transfer” the apparent meaning of a verse to a different meaning by means of a proof; this method is not without obvious inconsistencies. Although this view has gained considerable acceptance, it is incorrect and cannot be applied to the Qur’anic verses. The correct interpretation is that reality to which a verse refers; it is found in all verses, the decisive and the ambiguous alike; it is not a sort of a meaning of the word; it is a real fact that is too sublime for words; Allah has dressed them with words so as to bring them a bit nearer to our minds; in this respect they are like proverbs that are used to create a picture in the mind and thus help the hearer to clearly grasp the intended idea.
Therefore Sufi spiritual interpretations usually are accepted by Islamic scholars as authentic interpretations as long as certain conditions were met.[88] In Sufi history, these interpretations were sometimes considered religious innovations (bid’ah), as Salafis today believe. However, even among Shia, ta’wil is extremely controversial. For example, when Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, the leader of Islamic revolution, gave some lectures about Surat al-Fatiha in December 1979 and January 1980, some protests forced him to suspend it before he could proceed beyond the first two verses of the surah.

Relationship with other literature

The Torah and the Bible
“ It is He Who sent down to thee (step by step), in truth, the Book, confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and He sent down the criterion (of judgment between right and wrong). ”
—Qur’an 3:3 (Yusuf Ali)
The Qur’an speaks well of the relationship it has with former books (the Torah and the Gospel) and attributes their similarities to their unique origin and saying all of them have been revealed by the one God.
The Qur’an retells stories of many of the people and events recounted in Jewish and Christian sacred books (Tanakh, Bible) and devotional literature (Apocrypha, Midrash), although it differs in many details. Adam, Enoch, Noah, Heber, Shelah, Abraham, Lot, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Jethro, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Aaron, Moses, Ezra, Zechariah, Jesus, and John the Baptist are mentioned in the Qur’an as prophets of God (see Prophets of Islam). Muslims believe the common elements or resemblances between the Bible and other Jewish and Christian writings and Islamic dispensations is due to their common divine source, and that the original Christian or Jewish texts were authentic divine revelations given to prophets.
Muslims believe that those texts were neglected, corrupted (tahrif) or altered in time by the Jews and Christians and have been replaced by God’s final and perfect revelation, which is the Qur’an. However, many Jews and Christians[who?] believe that the historical biblical archaeological record refutes this assertion, because the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Tanakh and other Jewish writings which predate the origin of the Qur’an) have been fully translated, validating the authenticity of the Greek Septuagint.

Influence of Christian apocrypha
The Diatessaron, Protoevangelium of James, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Arabic Infancy Gospel are all alleged to have been sources that the author/authors drew on when creating the Qur’an. The Diatessaron especially may have led to the misconception in the Qur’an that the Christian Gospel is one text. However this is strongly refuted by Muslim scholars, who maintain that the Qur’an is the divine word of God without any interpolation, and the similarities exist only due to the one source.
Arab writing
After the Qur’an, and the general rise of Islam, the Arabic alphabet developed rapidly into a beautiful and complex form of art.
Wadad Kadi, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago and Mustansir Mir, Professor of Islamic studies at Youngstown State University state that:
Although Arabic, as a language and a literary tradition, was quite well developed by the time of Muhammad’s prophetic activity, it was only after the emergence of Islam, with its founding scripture in Arabic, that the language reached its utmost capacity of expression, and the literature its highest point of complexity and sophistication. Indeed, it probably is no exaggeration to say that the Qur’an was one of the most conspicuous forces in the making of classical and post-classical Arabic literature.
The main areas in which the Qur’an exerted noticeable influence on Arabic literature are diction and themes; other areas are related to the literary aspects of the Qur’an particularly oaths (q.v.), metaphors, motifs, and symbols. As far as diction is concerned, one could say that Qur’anic words, idioms, and expressions, especially “loaded” and formulaic phrases, appear in practically all genres of literature and in such abundance that it is simply impossible to compile a full record of them. For not only did the Qur’an create an entirely new linguistic corpus to express its message, it also endowed old, pre-Islamic words with new meanings and it is these meanings that took root in the language and subsequently in the literature…

Qur’an miracles
Islamic scholars believe that the Qur’an is miraculous by its very nature in being a revealed text and that similar texts cannot be written by human endeavor. Its miraculous nature is claimed to be evidenced by its literary style, suggested similarities between Qur’anic verses and scientific facts discovered much later, and various prophecies. The Qur’an itself challenges those who deny its claimed divine origin to produce a text like it. [Qur'an 17:88][Qur'an 2:23][Qur'an 10:38]. These claims originate directly from Islamic belief in its revealed nature, and are widely disputed by non-muslim scholars of Islamic history.

Qur’anic Initials
14 different Arabic letters form 14 different sets of “Qur’anic Initials” (the “Muqatta’at”, such as A.L.M. of 2:1) and prefix 29 suras in the Qur’an. The meaning and interpretation of these initials is considered unknown to most Muslims. In 1974, Egyptian biochemist Rashad Khalifa claimed to have discovered a mathematical code based on the number 19, which is mentioned in Sura 74:30 of the Qur’an.

In culture
Most Muslims treat paper copies of the Qur’an with veneration, ritually washing before reading the Qur’an. Worn out, torn, or errant (for example, pages out of order) Qur’ans are not discarded as wastepaper, but rather are left free to flow in a river, kept somewhere safe, burnt, or buried in a remote location. Many Muslims memorize at least some portion of the Qur’an in the original Arabic, usually at least the verses needed to perform the prayers. Those who have memorized the entire Qur’an earn the right to the title of Hafiz.
Based on tradition and a literal interpretation of sura 56:77-79: “That this is indeed a Qur’an Most Honourable, In a Book well-guarded, Which none shall touch but those who are clean.”, many scholars opine that a Muslim perform wudu (ablution or a ritual cleansing with water) before touching a copy of the Qur’an, or mus’haf. This view has been contended by other scholars on the fact that, according to Arabic linguistic rules, this verse alludes to a fact and does not comprise an order. The literal translation thus reads as “That (this) is indeed a noble Qur’ān, In a Book kept hidden, Which none toucheth save the purified,” (translated by Mohamed Marmaduke Pickthall). It is suggested based on this translation that performing ablution is not required.
Qur’an desecration means insulting the Qur’an by defiling or dismembering it. Muslims must always treat the book with reverence, and are forbidden, for instance, to pulp, recycle, or simply discard worn-out copies of the text. Respect for the written text of the Qur’an is an important element of religious faith by many Muslims. They believe that intentionally insulting the Qur’an is a form of blasphemy.

Criticism
The Qur’an’s teachings on matters of war and peace have become topics of heated discussion in recent years. On the one hand, some critics interpret that certain verses of the Qur’an sanction military action against unbelievers as a whole both during the lifetime of Muhammad and after. On the other hand, other scholars argue that such verses of the Qur’an are interpreted out of context, and argue that when the verses are read in context it clearly appears that the Qur’an prohibits aggression, and allows fighting only in self defense.

Miracle

Miracle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A miracle, is a fortuitous event believed to be caused by interposition of divine intervention by a supernatural being in the universe by which the ordinary course and operation of Nature is suspended, or modified. It is derived from the old Latin word miraculum meaning “something wonderful”.
Many folktales, religious texts, and people claim various events which they refer to as “miraculous”. It is disputed whether there are scientifically confirmed occurrences of miracles. Miracles are not subject to controlled experimentation and the mechanism of occurrence is not recognized by the scientific community. One aspect of some miracles which makes them almost impossible to verify is the fact that they are often manifested only to small groups of individuals, and sometimes several centuries ago.
People in different faiths have substantially different definitions of the word “miracle”. Even within a specific religion there is often more than one usage of the term.
Sometimes the term “miracle” may refer to the action of a supernatural being that is not a god. Thus, the term “divine intervention”, by contrast, would refer specifically to the direct involvement of a deity.
In casual usage, “miracle” may also refer to any statistically unlikely but beneficial event, (such as the survival of a natural disaster) or even to anything which is regarded as “wonderful” regardless of its likelihood, such as birth. Other miracles might be: survival of a fatal illness, escaping a life threatening situation or ‘beating the odds’.

Miracles as supernatural acts
In this view, a miracle is a violation of normal laws of nature by some supernatural entity. Some scientist-theologians like Polkinghorne suggest that miracles are not violations of the laws of nature but “exploration of a new regime of physical experience”.[1]
The logic behind an event being deemed a miracle varies significantly. Often a religious text, such as the Bible or Quran, states that a miracle occurred, and believers accept this as a fact.
Many conservative religious believers hold that in the absence of a plausible, parsimonious scientific theory, the best explanation for these events is that they were performed by a supernatural being, and cite this as evidence for the existence of a god or gods. However, Richard Dawkins criticises this kind of thinking as a subversion of Occam’s Razor.[2] Some adherents of monotheistic religions assert that miracles, if established, are evidence for the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent god.

Miracles in the Bible

In the Hebrew Bible
The descriptions of most miracles (in Hebrew – Neis, נס) in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) are often the same as the common definition of the word: God intervenes in the laws of nature.
A literal reading of the Tanakh shows a number of ways miracles are said to occur: God may suspend or speed up the laws of nature to produce a supernatural occurrence; God can create matter out of nothing; God can breathe life into inanimate matter. The Tanakh does not explain details of how these miracles happen.
The Tanakh attributes many natural occurrences to God, such as the sun rising and setting, and rain falling.
Today many Orthodox Jews, most Christians, and most Muslims adhere to this view of miracles. This view is generally rejected by non-Orthodox Jews, liberal Christians and Unitarian-Universalists. Biblical stories are interpreted by some as alegory or using figures of speech: In this view the “miracle” in the story may not have been intended to be taken literally.
Many events commonly understood to be miraculous may not actually be instances of the impossible, as commonly believed. For instance, consider the parting of the Sea of Reeds (in Hebrew Yâm-Sûph; often mistranslated as the “Red Sea”). This incident occurred when Moses and Israelites fled from bondage in Egypt, to begin their exodus to the promised land. The book of Exodus does not state that the Reed Sea split in a dramatic fashion. Rather, according to the text God caused a strong wind to slowly drive the shallow waters to land, overnight. There is no claim that God pushed apart the sea as shown in many films; rather, the miracle would be that Israel crossed this precise place, at exactly the right time, when Moses lifted his staff, and that the pursuing Egyptian army then drowned when the wind stopped and the piled waters rushed back in. Though this view is highly contended by more fundamental Christians who find it hard to believe that a “shallow” sea could drown an Egyptian Army with horses and chariots, contesting that it was a mighty miracle and an act of God on both sides of the crossing.
Most events later described as miracles are not labeled as such by the Bible; rather the text simply describes what happened. Often these narratives will attribute the cause of these events to God.

In the New Testament
The descriptions of most miracles in the Christian New Testament are often the same as the commonplace definition of the word: God intervenes in the laws of nature. In St John’s Gospel the “miracles” are referred to as “signs” and the emphasis is on God demonstrating his underlying normal activity in remarkable ways.[3]
Jesus is recorded as having turned water into wine; creating matter out of nothing, and thus turning a loaf of bread into many loaves of bread; and raising the dead. Jesus is also described as rising from the dead himself. Jesus explains in the New Testament that miracles are performed by faith in God. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “move from here to there” and it will move.” (Gospel of Matthew 17:20).

Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian views of miracles
Aristotle rejected the idea that God could or would intervene in the order of the natural world. Jewish neo-Aristotelian philosophers, who are still influential today, include Maimonides, Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon, and Gersonides. Directly or indirectly, their views are still prevalent in much of the religious Jewish community.

Miracles as events pre-planned by God
In rabbinic Judaism, many rabbis mentioned in the Talmud held that the laws of nature were inviolable. The idea of miracles that contravened the laws of nature were hard to accept; however, at the same time they affirmed the truth of the accounts in the Tanakh. Therefore some explained that miracles were in fact natural events that had been set up by God at the beginning of time.
In this view, when the walls of Jericho fell, it was not because God directly brought them down. Rather, God planned that there would be an earthquake at that place and time, so that the city would fall to the Israelites. Instances where rabbinic writings say that God made miracles a part of creation include Midrash Genesis Rabbah 5:45; Midrash Exodus Rabbah 21:6; and Ethics of the Fathers/Pirkei Avot 5:6.

Spinoza’s View of Miracles
In Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise he talks about miracles as those events of whose causes we are ignorant. Nor does he suggest we should just treat them as having no cause or of having a cause immediately available. Rather the miracle is for combating the ignorance it entails, it becomes a political project.

David Hume’s views of miracles
According to the philosopher David Hume, a miracle is “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” [4]

Non-literal interpretations of the text
These views are held by both classical and modern thinkers.
In Numbers 22 is the story of Balaam and the talking donkey. Many hold that for miracles such as this, one must either assert the literal truth of this biblical story, or one must then reject the story as false. However, some Jewish commentators (e.g. Saadiah Gaon and Maimonides) hold that stories such as these were never meant to be taken literally in the first place. Rather, these stories should be understood as accounts of a prophetic experience, which are dreams or visions. (Of course, such dreams and visions could themselves be considered miracles.)
Joseph H. Hertz, a 20th century Jewish biblical commentator, writes that these verses “depict the continuance on the subconscious plane of the mental and moral conflict in Balaam’s soul; and the dream apparition and the speaking donkey is but a further warning to Balaam against being misled through avarice to violate God command.”

As products of creative art and social acceptance
In this view, miracles do not really occur. Rather, they are the product of creative story tellers. They use them to embellish a hero or incident with a theological flavor. Using miracles in a story allows characters and situations to become bigger than life, and to stir the emotions of the listener more than the mundane and ordinary.

As misunderstood commonplace events
Littlewood’s law states that individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month. By its definition, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace. In other words, miracles do not exist, but are rather examples of low probability events that are bound to happen by chance from time to time.

Claims of Miracles in Christendom
C.S. Lewis, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, and Christians who engage in Christian apologetics have argued that miracles are reasonable and plausible. [5][6][7]

Claims of Miracles in the Catholic Church
The Catholic Church recognizes miracles as being works of God, either directly or through the prayers and intercession of a specific Saint or Saints. There is usually a specific purpose connected to a miracle, i.e. the conversion of a person or persons to the Catholic faith or the construction of a church desired by God. The Church tries to be very cautious to approve the validity of putative miracles. It requires a certain number of miracles to occur before granting sainthood, with particularly stringent requirements in validating the miracle’s authenticity. [1] The process is overseen by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints [2].
The Catholic Church claims to have confirmed the validity of a number of miracles, some of them occurring in modern times and having withstood the test of modern scientific scrutiny. Among the more notable miracles approved by the Church are several Eucharistic miracles wherein the Sacred Host is transformed visibly into Christ’s living Flesh and Blood, bleeds, hovers in the air, flies around, radiates light, and/or displays the image of Christ. The first example of the Host being visibly changed into human flesh and blood occurred at Lanciano, Italy around 700 A.D. Unlike some miracles of a more transient nature, the Flesh and Blood remain in Lanciano to this day, having been scientifically examined as recently as 1971. The examination claims to have found the miraculous substance not only to be actual flesh and blood (specifically heart tissue and type AB blood), but also to have the chemical composition of fresh, un-preserved tissue, despite Its having been present in the Church for over 1200 years. No natural explanation for this has been offered[citation needed].
Another alleged miracle is the Miracle of the Sun, which occurred near Fátima, Portugal on October 13, 1917. Anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people, who were gathered at a cove near Fátima, witnessed the sun dim, change colors, spin, dance about in the sky, and appear to plummet to earth, radiating great heat in the process. After the ten-minute event, the ground and the people’s clothing, which had been drenched by a previous rainstorm, were both dry. There are numerous reports of the details from both religious and secular sources, but there are many discrepancies.
In addition to these, the Catholic Church attributes miraculous causes to many otherwise inexplicable phenomena on a case-by-case basis. These include the incorruption (for centuries) of the bodies of several saints, some healings, and the spontaneous appearance of holy images on certain objects (most notably the Shroud of Turin, bearing Christ’s image, and the tilma of St. Juan Diego bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe)[citation needed]. Contrary to popular opinion, the truth of each miracle is meticulously examined not only from dogmatic and theological points of view, but also with the skepticism of science[citation needed]. Only after all other possible explanations have proven inadequate may the Church assume Divine intervention and declare the miracle worthy of veneration by the faithful (the Church does not, however, enjoin belief in any extra-Scriptural miracle as an article of faith or as necessary to salvation).

Protestant Claims
There have been numerous claims of miracles in Christendom. Mainline protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians accept spiritual gifts, including healing and the working of miracles.
Some of the types of miracles that are claimed to occur in modern times are healings, casting out demons, multiplying food, etc.
[edit] Miracles in Other Religions
Followers of the Indian gurus Sathya Sai Baba and Swami Premananda claim that they routinely perform miracles. The dominant view among skeptics is that these are predominantly sleight of hand or elaborate magic tricks.
Some modern religious groups claim ongoing occurrence of miraculous events. While some miracles have been proven to be fraudulent (see Peter Popoff for an example) others (such as the Paschal Fire in Jerusalem) have not proven susceptible to analysis. Some groups are far more cautious about proclaiming apparent miracles genuine than others, although official sanction, or the lack thereof, rarely has much effect on popular belief.