Page:EB1911 - Volume 15.djvu/932

 situated 600 ft. above sea-level, on the river Vardar, and on the Salonica-Mitrovitza railway, 25 m. S.E. of Uskub. Pop. (1905), about 22,000. Koprülü has a flourishing trade in silk; maize and mulberries are cultivated in the neighbourhood. The Greek and Bulgarian names of the town may be corrupt forms of the ancient Bylazora, described by Polybius as the chief city of Paeonia.  KORA, or, an ancient town of Northern India, in the Fatehpur district of the United Provinces. Pop. (1901), 2806. As the capital of a Mahommedan province, it gave its name to part of the tract (with Allahabad) granted by Lord Clive to the titular Mogul emperor, Shah Alam, in 1765.  KORAN. The Koran (Kor’án) is the sacred Book of Islam, on which the religion of more than two hundred millions of Mahommedans is founded, being regarded by them as the immediate word of God. And since the use of the Koran in public worship, in schools and otherwise, is much more extensive than, for example, the reading of the Bible in most Christian countries, it has been truly described as the most widely-read book in existence. This circumstance alone is sufficient to give it an urgent claim on our attention, whether it suit our taste and fall in with our religious and philosophical views or not. Besides, it is the work of Mahomet, and as such is fitted to afford a clue to the spiritual development of that most successful of all prophets and religious personalities. It must be owned that the first perusal leaves on a European an impression of chaotic confusion—not that the book is so very extensive, for it is not quite as large as the New Testament. This impression can in some degree be modified only by the application of a critical analysis with the assistance of Arabian tradition.

To the faith of the Moslems, as has been said, the Koran is the word of God, and such also is the claim which the book itself advances. For except in sur. i.—which is a prayer for men—and some few passages where Mahomet (vi. 104, 114; xxvii. 93; xlii. 8) or the angels (xix. 65; xxxvii. 164 sqq.) speak in the first person without the intervention of the usual imperative “say” (sing. or pl.), the speaker throughout is God, either in the first person singular or more commonly the plural of majesty “we.” The same mode of address is familiar to us from the prophets of the Old Testament; the human personality disappears, in the moment of inspiration, behind the God by whom it is filled. But all the greatest of the Hebrew prophets fall back speedily upon the unassuming human “I”; while in the Koran the divine “I” is the stereotyped form of address. Mahomet, however, really felt

himself to be the instrument of God; this consciousness was no doubt brighter at his first appearance than it afterwards became, but it never entirely forsook him. Nevertheless we cannot doubt his good-faith, not even in the cases in which the moral quality of his actions leaves most to be desired. In spite of all, the dominant fact remains, that to the end he was zealous for his God and for the salvation of his people, nay, of the whole of humanity, and that he never lost the unconquerable certainty of his divine mission.

The rationale of revelation is explained in the Koran itself as follows: In heaven is the original text (“the mother of the book,” xliii. 3; “a concealed book,” lv. 77; “a well-guarded tablet,” lxxxv. 22). By the process of “sending down” (tanzíl), one piece after another was communicated to the Prophet. The mediator was an angel, who is called sometimes the “Spirit” (xxvi. 193), sometimes the “holy Spirit” (xvi. 104), and at a later time “Gabriel” (only in ii. 91, 92; lxvi. 4). This angel dictates the revelation to the Prophet, who repeats it after him, and afterwards proclaims it to the world (lxxxvii. 6, &c.). It is plain that we have here a somewhat crude attempt of the Prophet to represent to himself the more or less unconscious process by which his ideas arose and gradually took shape in his mind. It is no wonder if in such confused imagery the details are not always self-consistent. When, for example, this heavenly archetype is said to be in the hands of “exalted scribes” (lxxx. 13 sqq.), this seems a transition to a quite different set of ideas, namely, the books of fate, or the record of all human actions—conceptions which are actually found in the Koran. It is to be observed, at all events, that Mahomet’s transcendental idea of God, as a Being exalted altogether above the world, excludes the thought of direct intercourse between the Prophet and God.

It is an explicit statement of the Koran that the sacred book was revealed (“sent down”) by God, not all at once, but piecemeal and gradually (xxv. 34). This is evident from the actual composition of the book, and is confirmed by Moslem tradition. That is to say,

Mahomet issued his revelations in fly-leaves of greater or less extent. A single piece of this kind was called either, like the entire collection, kor’ān, i.e. “recitation,” “reading,” or, better still, is the equivalent of Aramaic geryānā “lectionary”; or kitāb, “writing”; or sūra, which is perhaps the late-Hebrew shūrā, and means literally “series.” The last became, in the lifetime of Mahomet, the regular designation of the individual sections as distinguished from the whole collection; and accordingly it is the name given to the separate chapters of the existing Koran. These chapters are of very unequal length. Since many of the shorter ones are undoubtedly complete in themselves, it is natural to assume that the longer, which are sometimes very comprehensive, have arisen from the amalgamation of various originally distinct revelations. This supposition is favoured by the numerous traditions which give us the circumstances under which this or that short piece, now incorporated in a larger section, was revealed; and also by the fact that the connexion of thought in the present sūras often seems to be interrupted. And in reality many pieces of the long sūras have to be severed out as originally independent; even in the short ones parts are often found which cannot have been there at first. At the same time we must beware of carrying this sifting operation too far,—as Nöldeke now believes himself to have done in his earlier works, and as Sprenger also sometimes seems to do. That some sūras were of considerable length from the first is seen, for example, from xii., which contains a short introduction, then the history of Joseph, and then a few concluding observations, and is therefore perfectly homogeneous. In like manner, xx., which is mainly occupied with the history of Moses, forms a complete whole. The same is true of xviii., which at first sight seems to fall into several pieces; the history of the seven sleepers, the grotesque narrative about Moses, and that about Alexander “the Horned,” are all connected together, and the same rhyme through the whole sūra. Even in the separate narrations we may observe how readily the Koran passes from one subject to another, how little care is taken to express all the transitions of thought, and how frequently clauses are omitted, which are almost indispensable. We are not at liberty, therefore, in every case where the connexion in the Koran is obscure, to say that it is really broken, and set it down as the clumsy patchwork of a later hand. Even in the old Arabic poetry such abrupt transitions are of very frequent occurrence. It is not uncommon for the Koran, after a new subject has been entered on, to return gradually or suddenly to the former theme,—a proof that there at least separation is not to be thought of. In short, however imperfectly the Koran may have been redacted, in the majority of cases the present sūras are identical with the originals.

How these revelations actually arose in Mahomet’s mind is a question which it is almost as idle to discuss as it would be to analyse the workings of the mind of a poet. In his early career, sometimes perhaps in its later stages also, many revelations must have burst from him in uncontrollable excitement, so that he could not possibly regard them otherwise than as divine inspirations. We must bear in mind that he was no cold systematic thinker, but an Oriental visionary, brought up in crass superstition, and without intellectual discipline; a man whose nervous temperament had been powerfully worked on by ascetic austerities, and who was all the more irritated by the opposition he encountered, because he had little of the heroic in his nature. Filled with his religious ideas and visions, he might well fancy he heard the angel bidding him recite what was said to him. There may have been many a revelation of this kind which no one ever heard but himself, as he repeated it to himself in the silence