The Quran

The Quran, the scripture of Islam, is received within the tradition as the direct speech of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in seventh-century Arabia. Regarded as the literal divine word, it is recited, memorized, and revered as the central source of faith and practice, its language and cadence inseparable from its authority.

Its summons is to islam, submission, an inner reorientation of the whole self toward the one reality. Beyond outward observance, the text repeatedly calls the human being to remembrance of God, to mindfulness of the divine presence, and to the turning of the heart away from heedlessness. This insistence on the alignment of the inner self with the one God gives the scripture a profoundly interior dimension alongside its law and narrative.

From this seedbed the contemplative tradition of Sufism would later flower, drawing on the Quran's language of remembrance, nearness, and the purification of the heart to develop an elaborate mysticism of the inner life. As the foundation of Islamic spirituality, the scripture stands at the origin of one of the world's great traditions of inner reorientation toward the divine.