The Koran was revealed orally, but very soon people realized that it had to be written down in order to make sure that it wasn’t corrupted and that the original message was maintained. And from a very early day, and it’s very unclear when that day was, because no early manuscripts of the Koran survive, people began copying it down. 

 

The Koran is a revelation of spiritual teaching of both ethical and social guidance. It was revealed and remains in Arabic. 

 

What's so extraordinary about the Koran is its naturalness, so that it can say the most powerful cosmic things with a sense of intimacy, so that power and tenderness come together constantly in the Koranic language. 

 

With words alone, the Koran delivers a division to the faithful. Its imagery conjures a picture of the afterlife that resonates with all the power of traditional Bedouin poetry. 

 

Imagine yourself in the desert, surrounded by dust, by the glare of the sun. You wear cloaks to cover your body because the wind will just sear your skin right off your face and you walk into an oasis. The temperature drops dramatically. There is a quiet there. The wind is no longer howling. Everywhere you look you see green and color. The world of water and paradise are symbolically tied to one another. And the Koran conjures that up with just a few briefly chosen words. 

 

Yet for all the imagery of paradise in the Koran, there was no easy description of God. The mystery would remain.

 

It's very difficult to talk about God without reifying God, reifying to make God into a thing or anthropomorphizing God, to make God into a projection of our own human self. And that's why Muslims don’t like sculpture, for example, traditionally, because they believe that there is that danger. And the Koran avoids that by constantly shifting the pronouns, so we can't really reify God, and get an image, a physical image of God.