Wonder of Wonders: A Qur’an Literacy Camp

The 2nd National Qur’an Literacy Camp is under way in the West Indies even as I write this piece in the middle of the month of July, 2008. The wonder of wonders is that the Qur’an that threw open the doors of literacy and education to the whole world for the first time in human history has itself now got to be taught to its believers and self-professed adherents using special literacy camps at the local, regional, national and international levels.

What the world in general does not know or appreciate, and what most Muslims also do not know or understand, is the fact that the Qur’an came to make the world a literate and educated place – the whole world that is. It came to inaugurate a new era of literacy, education and enlightenment for the entire human race – with no exceptions or exclusions whatsoever. That is right.

The Qur’an came into our world to wipe the last traces of superstition, ignorance, backwardness and bondage from the face of a benighted planet earth and usher in a new birth of liberty and empowerment for all human beings regardless their birth or status or gender. And yet today Muslims have strayed so far from their patented and copyrighted path of education, enlightenment and mass empowerment the Qur’an had emblazoned that we now have to hold Qur’an literacy camps for Muslims themselves.

But it is a good sign nevertheless.

It is a blessing from Allah that we can turn to the learning and teaching of the Qur’an once again. That we are on the path, once again, to rekindle the love and learning of the Qur’an in the hearts and minds of broad swaths of Muslim masses – and everyone else that would open their bosom to the light, power, radiance and guidance of the Qur’an.

When humanity was steeped in the depth of darkness of every kind, from near-universal illiteracy and lack of education to near-total tyranny over the minds and bodies of men as well as women – to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson – the Qur’an threw open the gates of universal literacy and education for all – male as well as female; child as well as adult; rich as well as poor; slave as well as free.

It inaugurated in the history of humanity a new and unprecedented era of literacy and education not just for kings and their families, not just for the priestly classes and professionals, not just for the rich landlords and barons – the Royalty, the Clergy and the Nobility, as they used to be called – but for every one.

That means all the slaves; all the peasants; all the serfs; all the poor and landless people; and all those in any from or fashion that qualified as members of the human race.

And it also included, for the first time in human history, all the women. That is right, women, who until that time – and until very recently in fact – continued to be treated as chattel or property by much of the world, including the Western-Christian world.

That is because till that time – till the advent of the Qur’an in this world at the top of the Seventh Century – reading and writing were forbidden arts. They were open, available and required of the Royalty, the Clergy and the Nobility but they were forbidden territory to everyone else. At times on pain of death.

That means those ordinary human beings who were caught reading or writing, often the Scripture, were subject to corporal or physical punishment, including decapitation and death. And that also generally included women, who in the Western world could also be burned alive – at the stake as they say – as witches for the crimes of being experts in reading and writing, for knowing too much, and for just being too smart, too capable and too skilled, especially as compared to the men folk.

The Qur’an came into this world and put an end to this sorry state of the human race. It declared an end to the era of illiteracy and ushered in a new dawn of freedom and discovery for the human race.

The Qur’an thereafter went on to build on earth an unprecedented and unsurpassed era of several hundred years of near-universal human education, enlightenment and empowerment. It established on earth a period of near-complete equality, justice and dignity for all human beings. And it changed forever the way human beings thought, worked, raised their families, treated each other, organized their lives and constructed their cultures and civilizations.

With all its limitations of quantity and quality it began to develop over the years, it was nonetheless a period of heaven on earth. For, it was for most people for the longest period of time – for well over a thousand years even in its most attenuated, weakened, diluted, corrupted or fragmented form, it was what truly devout Christians would call the Kingdom of God on earth; what truly pious Hindus would consider a reflection of Ram Rajya on earth; or what others would mean when they use expressions like Shangri-La or Utopia.

The Qur’an thus began a new era of rights and freedoms on earth that clothed the naked; that fed the hungry; that empowered the weak; that uplifted the meek and the humble; and that gave voice and dignity to those who had none.

It made peace on earth not just a happy slogan but a hard reality. It offered everyone within their jurisdiction an opportunity at a stable, dignified and prosperous life. It made universal literacy and education not only a basic human right for human beings of all ages, genders and social standing, but a fundamental duty and requirement of membership in the free, equal and enlightened social order it created in different parts of the world.

It was 1400 years ago that the Qur’an fully, totally, unequivocally and categorically absolved Jews of the false charge of being killers of Jesus Christ (may God bless him) that European and other Christians had levelled against them for over half a millennium (600 years) before the advent of the Qur’an.

For centuries before Islam and the Qur’an, the Christendom, which later on came to be a collective name for the lands and peoples of Christian Europe, used the baseless and false charge of Christ-killing to murder and rape the Jews at will; to pillage and plunder their wealth; to destroy and burn down their homes and businesses; to confiscate their properties; and to repeatedly expel them from lands where they had settled.

The societies that the Qur’an built provided safe haven to victims of injustice and persecution from everywhere. They provided peace and prosperity to refugees and asylum-seekers from around the world, even when they themselves fell victim to the vagaries of time and began to develop signs of social disorganisation, political degeneration and moral decay and degradation.

At the head of this group of refugees and asylum-seekers were Jews who had suffered centuries of unspeakable persecutions, pogroms and horrors at the hands of European Christians, who generally accused them of the historic crime of Christ-killing and used that as an excuse to perpetrate the most barbaric atrocities against them.

But as early as the beginning of the Seventh Century, and in one clear and categorical swoop, the Qur’an had absolved the Jews of the false charge of being the killers of Christ.

The Qur’an declared – my paraphrase: “Absolutely, positively, they did not kill him!”

Wa maa qataloohu yaqeenaa, said the Qur’an.

And Muslim societies, in later years, following whatever fragments of Qur’anic teachings they found convenient, able or inclined to embrace, still opened their doors and hearts to the hunted and hounded Jews of Europe, who flocked to them in droves and settled down to become prominent scholars, doctors, scientists, business leaders and others as an integral part of these Muslim societies.