What Does it Mean: The Qur’an Never Grows Older?

 

The Qur’an retains its youth and freshness as if being revealed anew in every epoch. Since as an eternal discourse it addresses all human beings of different levels in every age, it should have a never-fading freshness, and indeed it has.

The Qur’an so impresses the succeeding epochs that each, differing from others in ideas and potentialities, regards the Qur’an as being revealed to itself particularly and receives its instructions from it. Although the words of the human mind and the laws it produces become old like human beings themselves and therefore are revised or changed, the laws and principles which the Qur’an decreed are so established and constant and so compatible with essential human nature and the unchanging laws of creation that, except to show their truth, validity and force more clearly, the passage of centuries do not have the least effect on them. Indeed, this century, including its people of the Book—the Christians and Jews—is more confident of itself than preceding ones, and is most of all in need of the guiding messages of the Qur’an beginning with O people of the Book, for, since they also mean O people of schooling and education, those messages are as if directed toward this century exclusively. With all its strength and freshness, the Qur’an makes resound throughout the world its loud call: Say: ‘O people of the Book! Come now to a word common between us and you, that we serve none but God, and that we associate not anything with Him, and do not some of us take others as lords, apart from God.’ (3.64).

The present civilization, which is the product of the ideas of the whole of mankind and perhaps also of the jinn, has adopted an attitude of contending with the Qur’an, which individuals and communities have been unable to dispute with. It tries to contradict the miraculousness of the Qur’an through its charm and ‘spells’. In order to prove the miraculousness of the Qur’an against this new, terrible opponent, and affirm its challenge in Say: ‘If men and jinn banded together to produce the like of this Qur’an, they would never produce its like, not though they backed one another’ (al-Isra’, 17.88), I will compare the principles and foundations on which modern civilization is based in opposing the Qur’an, with those of the Qur’an.

 

This article has been adapted from Risale- i Nur Collection.