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THE MESSAGE: 003/ 1 TO 4 The Message of The Quran translated and explained by Muhammad Asad
In the name of God, The Most Gracious, The Dispenser of Grace: 3:1 Alif. Lam. Mim.1 3:2 GOD - there is no deity save Him, the Ever-Living, the Self-Subsistent Fount of All Being! 3:3 Step by step has He bestowed upon thee from on high this divine writ,2 setting forth the truth which confirms whatever there still remains [of earlier revelations]:3 for it is He who has bestowed from on high the Torah and the Gospel (3:4) aforetime, as a guidance unto mankind, and it is He who has bestowed [upon man] the standard by which to discern the true from the false.4 Behold, as for those who are bent on denying God's messages - grievous suffering awaits them: for God is almighty, an avenger of evil. 1 see Appendix II 2 The gradualness of the Qur'anic revelation is stressed here by means of the grammatical form nazzala. 3 Most of the commentators are of the opinion that ma bayna yadayhi - lit., "that which is between its hands" - denotes here "the revelations which came before it", i.e., before the Qur'an. This interpretation is not, however, entirely convincing. Although there is not the least doubt that in this context the pronominal ma refers to earlier revelations, and particularly the Bible (as is evident from the parallel use of the above expression in other Qur'anic passages), the idiomatic phrase ma bayna yadayhi does not, in itself, mean "that which came before it" - i.e., in time - but, rather (as pointed out by me in surah 2, note 247), "that which lies open before it". Since, however, the pronoun "it" relates here to the Qur'an, the metaphorical expression "between its hands or "before it" cannot possibly refer to "knowledge" (as it does in 2:255), but must obviously refer to an objective reality with which the Qur'an is "confronted": that is, something that was coexistent in time with the revelation of the Qur'an. Now this, taken together (a) with the fact - frequently stressed in the Qur'an and since established by objective scholarship - that in the course of the millennia the Bible has been subjected to considerable and often arbitrary alteration, and (b) with the fact that many of the laws enunciated in the Qur'an differ from the laws of the Bible, brings us forcibly to the conclusion that the "confirmation" of the latter by the Qur'an can refer only to the basic truths still discernible in the Bible, and not to its time-bound legislation or to its present text - in other words, a confirmation of whatever was extant of its basic teachings at the time of the revelation of the Qur'an: and it is this that the phrase ma bayna yadayhi expresses in this context as well as in 5:46 and 48 or in 61:6 (where it refers to Jesus' confirming the truth of "whatever there still remained [i.e., in his lifetime] of the Torah"). 4 It is to be borne in mind that the Gospel frequently mentioned in the Qur'an is not identical with what is known today as the Four Gospels, but refers to an original, since lost, revelation bestowed upon Jesus and known to his contemporaries under its Greek name of Evangelion ("Good Tiding"), on which the Arabicized form Injil is based. It was probably the source from which the Synoptic Gospels derived much of their material and some of the teachings attributed to Jesus. The fact of its having been lost and forgotten is alluded to in the Qur'an in 5:14. - Regarding my rendering of al-furqan as "the standard by which to discern the true from the false", see also note 38 on the identical phrase occurring in 2:53.
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