Qur’an (Koran)

Audience

According to the tradition that makes the Qur'an the revelation of God through the archangel Gabriel, Muhammad himself would count as the original audience, albeit, according to the same tradition, a reluctant one. Within the historical realm, Muhammad began to recite the Qur'an first to his wife, Khadijah. She had recognized the talent of the orphaned Muhammad early and had used her capital to set him up as a merchant before marrying him. She received the first recitation of the Qur'an seriously and encouraged Muhammad to go ahead with public preaching of his revelation. This brought Muhammad a small following in Mecca. But most of the city’s population rejected him as a blasphemer against traditional religion, and he was eventually forced to leave the city with only a small band of the first Muslims.

As Muhammad became a more important figure politically and militarily, the number of those receptive to the Qur'an grew, until by the time of his death, when he had become ruler of the whole Arabian Peninsula, he had also extended the ummah, or community of Muslims, over the same area. Almost incredibly, given the meagerness of Muhammad’s beginnings in life and as a preacher, he intended from very early on for the new religion of Islam to spread across the entire world and become the sole religion of the human race. In particular, he meant to encounter and convert the entire communities of followers of the three monotheistic religions that then flourished to the north of Arabia: not only Judaism and Christianity but the Zoroastrianism of the Iranian Empire as well. The Qur'an’s claim to universalism for Islam descends from the same claims made for other late-antique religions, such as Manichaeanism and the Christianity that became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Within fifty years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims had already conquered half of the Byzantine Empire and virtually all of Iran, bringing the Qur'an with them. The modern-day audience for the Qur'an is the entire ummah of one and a half billion Muslims throughout the world, stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and from Mali to Inner Asia, and including large Islamic immigrant communities in Europe and North America.