Book Review: “The Life of the Qur’an” by Mohamad Jebara
Life and Times
As a Christian, I have to profess my ignorance when it comes to all things related to Islam and the Qur’an. I need to, at some point, sit down with the Islamic holy book and attempt to read it. Having not read it so far into my religious book reviewing career, I can only go by what I’ve heard others say about it. For instance, I wonder if the Qur’an demotes women to a position underneath livestock. (According to the book up for review here, The Life of the Qur’an, the short answer is no.) I also wonder how the Qur’an has been used to justify holy war — a subject that I’m not well-versed in understanding. Well, some of my ignorance has lifted like a veil after reading The Life of the Qur’an. This book is a companion piece to author Mohamad Jebara’s previous work, Muhammad, the World-Changer. While that book was an attempt to tell a straight biography of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, this book is more a chronological history of how the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad throughout 22 years of writing. The two books are, in my mind, meant to be read side-by-side. A lot of what’s in The Life of the Qur’an is a repeat of what’s in Muhammad, the World-Changer. And that’s not to speak of the repetition you’ll find within The Life of the Qur’an: the book brings up no less than three times the fact that Muslim mothers would put cotton in the ears of their children lest they hear impure ideas while walking the streets of Mecca.
Still, if you take away that deficiency, you’re left with a powerful, albeit challenging, work to read. The Life of the Qur’an is divided into three sections. The first talks about the roots of the Qur’an: how the Arabic language shaped the Islamic holy book and the reasons behind so many divergent interpretations from reader to reader. This section of the book looks at why three Arabic letters start each of the major sections of the Qur’an and what they could mean or unlock in the text. The second part of the book is the chronological blow-by-blow of how the Qur’an was gradually revealed. This section follows what was previously told in Muhammad, the World-Changer but looks at the events relayed there through the lens of the Qur’an’s revealing, rather than through a third-person narrative. The third part of the book looks at the Qur’an’s impact: how it has come to be that so much blood has been shed over the book and the spirit and philosophy of the Qur’an that has influenced everything from the creation of algebra to the development of eyeglasses. There’s a lot of ground to cover here, but the book generally does what it sets out to do remarkably well.
Yes, there is repetition. However, in some cases, it was welcome repetition. After all, I read Muhammad, the World-Changer some two years ago, and the fact that I read an awful lot didn’t exactly remember large swaths of it. Thus, it was good to get a reminder of the salient points of that book brought up again to twig my memory. I can say that The Life of the Qur’an sustains interest: I read this in a single day, unable to put this book down. That is not to say, though, that there aren’t any dry stretches. This is an intellectual book, and sometimes the philosophizing can get a little wearying from time to time. However, it is an illustrative and instructive work that seeks to sew together how the Qur’an came into existence. The process of what was revealed at key points of Muhammad’s life intrigued me. And, of course, knowing what part of the Qur’an was revealed at a certain point probably yields a new light being shone on key passages — giving them new, fresh meaning that hadn’t been looked at in millennia.
Overall, The Life of the Qur’an is an enjoyable work. I did feel that some of this could have been winnowed down somewhat, and — to a certain extent — I did feel that this work rides the coattails of the author’s previous account. Still, this is a book best suited to those who are novices, such as me, when it comes to the Qur’an and anything having to do with the world of Islam. Going back to the ignorance I felt I had in the first paragraph of this review, I was surprised to learn how much the original intent of the Qur’an was to protect women’s inheritance rights. And Jebara’s thumbnail history of where things went wrong in Islam is enlightening — though, honestly, I feel that an entirely different book is waiting to be written there. It’ll be neat to see where Jebara goes from here in his scholarship of Islam for the ignorant (the author’s introduction to this tells us that he didn’t presuppose that the reader knew anything about Islam or the Qur’an). However, if you don’t mind the repetition, The Life of the Qur’an is an appealing follow-up to the Muhammad biography. If you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty with the ethnography of words in Arabic to start with, this will likely delight readers of all religious stripes used to this sort of thing in books tailored to other religions. I think I learned something from The Life of the Qur’an, which is high praise indeed.
Mohamad Jebara’s The Life of the Qur’an: From Eternal Roots to Enduring Legacy was published by St. Martin’s Essentials on February 27, 2024.
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