Muhammad, the Prophet, was according to his own belief and that of his community the recipient of the Revelation, God’s human instrument. It was his mission to ‘repeat’ and ‘recite’ the message of the heavenly Book of Revelation. ‘Recite; in the name of your Lord’ – with this introduction to the first revelation (sura 96) he found himself called to be a prophet; there then followed the command ‘Stand up and warn’ (sura 74) which designated him as the messenger of God to His people. Believers gathered around him and they soon began to note down individual revelations; there are in the Koran itself allusions to the fact that a knowledge of writing was quite common in the commercial city of Mecca. For the community of believers these writings soon became an integral part of the worship of God; a text to be recited (qur’Ån ‘recitation’), the Holy Book, which joined the books of the old religions and replaced them. But the task of writing down and collecting of the revelations was not completed during the lifetime of Mu˙ammad; this occurred only later in the generation of his immediate successors. A recent investigation has tried with penetrating arguments to prove the opposite (John Burton), arguing that it was indeed the Prophet himself who had the Revelations written down and that at a later date Islamic lawyers made a distinction between the Revealed Book of God, and the codified Koran, only so as to be able to use variant readings and apocryphal material, and therefore denied the Prophet the achievement of having assembled the Koran (Source: Islam a Historical Introduction).
Islam the Last Version of Abrahamic Monotheism
