The Message of the Quran

an excerpt from the:   Foreword!--end of chaptitle--READ in the name of thy Sustainer, who has created -?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /created man out of a germ-cell!Read - for thy Sustainer is the Most Bountiful One who has taught [man] the use of the pen -taught man what he did not know. With these opening verses of the ninety-sixth surah - with an allusion to man's humble biological origin as well as to his consciousness and intellect - began, early in the seventh century of the Chnstian era, the revelation of the Qur'an to the Prophet Muhammad, destined to continue during the twenty-three years of his ministry and to end, shortly before his death, with verse 281 of the second surah:   And be conscious of the Day on which you shall be brought back unto God,   whereupon every human being shall be repaid in full for what he has earned,   and none shall be wronged; Between these first and last verses (the first and the last in the chronological order of their revelation)1 unfolds a book which, more than any other single phenomenon known to us, has fundamentally affected the religious, social and political history of the world. No other sacred scripture has ever had a similarly immediate impact upon the lives of the people who first heard its message and, through them and the generations that followed them, on the entire course of civilization. It shook Arabia, and made a nation out of its perennially warring tribes; within a few decades, it spread its world-view far beyond the confines of Arabia and produced the first ideological society known to man; through its insistence on consciousness and knowledge, it engendered among its followers a spirit of intellectual curiosity and independent inquiry, ultimately resulting in that splendid era of learning and scientific research which distinguished the world of Islam at the height of its cultural vigour; and the culture thus fostered by the Qur'an penetrated in countless ways and by-ways into the mind of medieval Europe and gave rise to that revival of Western culture which we call the Renaissance, and thus became in the course of time largely responsible for the birth of what is described as the "age of science": the age in which we are now living.