102 The messenger and the message

According to the Hadith his wife Aicha testified that Mohammed ‘lived’ the Koran. That made him at the same time a man, a lover and a Prophet. But in his youth in Mecca he was an orphan who became by marriage the foreman of a caravan and after his move to Medina he became a statesman and a warrior out of necessity. These eight ‘roles’ are very important to keep constantly in mind when reading the Koran. He clearly was a man who knew what was going down in the world from hands on experience. One could speculate about why this man at that time and place was the chosen human to channel the Divine message. But reading his life and how he dealt with the challenges the revelations presented it fits. Of course it could have been made to fit by either God or if you are cynical, by subsequent writers, but one way or the other this man acquitted himself of his difficult task. The question is: is it God who forms the words of the revelations or Mohammed? It must be God because Mohammed’s human (fallible, time shackled) brain would not be able to process what is Divine. At the same time the message must have been made superficially understandable for Arabs living in the 7th century and given an eternal quality as it would be the last Divine communication. That should make the message multi layered and extensive. It had to address urgently the wrongs of the moment but it had also to have a lasting validity, guiding humanity on its merry and erratic way through time and forever changing circumstances. This way one had to expect that not everything could be understood equally always and not everybody could be happy with its meaning at all times. A meaning could become clear over time when circumstances demanded it. Anyway to me it seems like a giant jigsaw puzzle: extremely complicated but meant to be solvable… somehow… eventually, Inshallah…