The Jews were commanded by God to preserve their holy book, the Torah. The responsibility for preserving these early divine scriptures thus fell to their followers, whereas it was God who Himself shouldered the burden of keeping the Quran intact: ‘We have, without doubt, sent down the Message, and We will assuredly guard it.’ (15:9) Earlier scriptures were books of God just as the Quran was. The only difference was that the bearers of those books failed in their task of preserving them, and hence they lost their original qualities. As for the Quran, God having taken it upon Himself to provide His special divine succour for its safeguarding, it remained in its pristine state.
This, however, does not mean that angels will descend from heaven in order to keep the Quran under their protection. The present world being one of trial, the realities of the next world remain hidden from us in this life. It can therefore never happen that the angels will virtually come down in order to guard the Quran. All such things are achieved in this world under normal and not extraordinary circumstances. Here this task is to be performed by us normal human beings, and through historical processes, without the veil of the unseen being lifted. Events throughout human history bear out God’s fulfillment of His promise- Muslims as well as non-Muslims, individuals as well as communities have been pressed into this service by God. So far as the former prophets are concerned, they were unable to secure sufficient numbers of followers to provide a strong guarantee of the preservation of the book of God. But the case of the Prophet of Islam is distinctly different from that of the other prophets. On the occasion of Hajjatul wida, the last pilgrimage, which the Prophet performed two and a half months before his death, he was accompanied by one lakh and forty thousand Muslims on the plains of Arafat. One can guess from this that by the end of his life the number of believers, both men and women taken together, must have been around five lakhs. This number is quite extraordinarily large, considering that the world population in ancient times was much less than it is today. After the death of the Prophet this number went on increasing as nation after nation embraced Islam. In this way a vast human group came into being as had never previously existed for the guarding of any other revealed scriptures.
Another helpful event that followed was a series of conquests both in and outside of Arabia by which the Muslims progressively gained dominance over a vast inhabited territory of the ancient world and established the greatest and the strongest empire of the time. This empire, too strong to be overcome by any other power, was well able to guard the authenticity of the Quran, resisting all onslaughts for over a thousand years. Then with the advent of the age of the press, the possibility of the Quran ever being destroyed was finally ruled out.
In the age of the press it became possible to print a million copies from just one manuscript – something which had been an impossibility in ancient times, when each copy was separately hand-written. That was why one copy differed from another to some extent. This happened with all ancient books. It was only in the case of the Quran, of which tens of thousands of copies had been separately hand-written before the age of the press, (a large number of copies are still available in museums and libraries) that, amazingly, there was not the slightest difference between one manuscript and another. If Muslims became so alert and sensitive to maintaining the perfection of the Quran, it was because of God’s special divine succour.
Besides this, there was another God-inspired arrangement. That is, the unique method of committing all of the text to memory, which came to be practiced in the case of the Quran—a method which had never before been applied to any other book in the history of mankind. Hundreds of thousands of people were motivated (by God) to learn by rote the text of the Quran from beginning to end. Right from the beginning of the Quran down to our own day, thousands of people known as hafiz (those who commit the whole Quran to memory) have existed in every generation. History tells us that there is no other book whose followers have shown such extreme care in memorizing its text. It was this custom of remembering the Quran by heart that made its preservation possible. This unique system was termed by a French orientalist as ‘double-checking’, i.e. first matching the contents of one copy with another and then checking it again from memory.
Every procedure followed for the protection of the Quran for 1500 years of Islamic history was assisted by God. However, in order that this world should remain a testing ground for mankind, all this took place under a veil (that is, although it was God who influenced events and motivated the people, He remained hidden, because man is on trial in this world). On Doomsday, when all realities are laid bare, people will observe how God Himself was directly performing the task of guarding the Quran right from the beginning of the Islamic revolution to the advent of the age of the press, which with its more sophisticated method of replication, facilitated the rapid propagation of God’s message.
There is another vital aspect of this special divine arrangement for the eternal continuance of the Quran: God requires the Muslims to preserve not just its wordings but, more importantly, its meanings. Whereas the test of former people of the book lay in perpetuating the exact wordings of their scriptures, the real test of the Muslim ummah lies in the guarding of their scriptures’ meaning. Since the Muslims’ predecessors failed in their test, God Himself undertook the responsibility of keeping the Quran intact.
As a matter of divine trial, Muslims have to prove that they do not deviate from the text in their explanations and interpretations, and of having kept everything in the exact place designated by the Quran. In their commentaries, they must take the greatest care to make no shift in emphasis, for that would be tantamount to altering the goals of the sacred text. When presenting the Quran to others, they should convey exactly what it asserts, no less and no more.
The failure of Muslims as the people of the Quran lies in their forgetting its spirit and using the Quran simply as a book of blessing rather than a book of guidance. When Muslims’ degeneration reaches this stage, their activities become directed away from the basics of Islam. They refer to their religion, their holy book, as being matters of national pride. Others engage themselves in show business in the name of Islam. Yet others exploit it for political gain.
All these activities, even if they are indulged in in the name of the Quran and Islam, are all deviations from sacred principles. If Muslims persist in engaging themselves in such activities, they will not escape the wrath of God. If they feel satisfied that they will be saved on the ground that they have spared no effort in preserving the words of the Quran, they are grossly mistaken. God will hold them responsible for having distorted the meanings of the Quranic text out of all recognition.
It should be clearly understood that the Muslims will be taken to task for the meaning of the text just as the earlier peoples of the Book had been taken to task for having altered the wording of their scriptures. It is on this point that the Muslims are perennially tested. Having changed the meaning of the Quran by their self-styled interpretations, they cannot escape the wrath of God simply because they have made no change in the text.
No man can be tested unless he be given freedom of action as well. Muslims are free to interpret the text, but not to alter it. One must fully grasp this point that the punishment meted out to other peoples of the Book for altering the wordings of the divine text will be meted out to Muslims for altering the meaning of the text. Herein lies the gauge of the Muslims. If by their self-styled interpretations they change the meaning of the sacred text, they cannot be spared divine punishment by the mere fact of not having changed the actual words. It is because the test of man lies in his sphere of power. Now, forbidden to change the words of the Quran, Muslims can change only its meaning. So it will be on this very point that they will be taken to task.
