al-Qur'an Ka'in Hayy

Al-Qur'an Ka'in Hayy ("The Qur'an Is a Living Being") is a book of essays by the Egyptian writer Mostafa Mahmoud; the copy used here is the Dar al-Ma'arif printing whose colophon bears deposit number 1993/3199 ^{3 4}. What follows are the author's views, attributed to him.

By the table of contents: The Qur'an Is a Living Being; The Self and the Spirit; Why Did God Create Us?; The Sufi and the Sea; Who Are You?; The Style of the Friday Sermon; Israel Alters the Gospels; Atomic Science and Islam; Islam and Medicine; On Free Will and Determinism; The Divine Stratagem (al-makr al-ilahi); On the Outer and the Inner ².

The author says that the Qur'an's inimitability in eloquence and expression has been treated at length "by the ancients", but he dwells on an aspect he calls "the architecture or engineered structure, the organic composition or living connection between word and word" ¹. A Qur'anic word, for him, is like a cell in an embryo: it repeats perhaps hundreds of times and yet never repeats, since each time it carries a new scene, branching from the general to the detailed as a seed gives root, stem, leaves and fruit ^{1 5}.

He takes as an example the word "knowledge" and the call to look: looking comes first in general terms, at the creation of the heavens and the earth, then in detail in al-Ghashiya, verses 17-20, which he links to biology, astronomy, geology and geography; then as looking at history in al-Rum, verse 42; then as looking at "how creation began" in al-Ankabut, verse 20, which he links to evolution and anthropology ^{5 6}. In the same way he follows the word nutfa from al-Mu'minun, verse 12 to al-Qiyama, verse 37 and al-Insan, verse 2, reading "a mingled nutfa" in terms of what is now known as genes ⁶.

In this chapter the author criticises a preacher who addresses people in the age of satellites "from the pulpit of bygone centuries", with nothing to offer but threats of torment, backed by hadiths whose narrators, he says, were "fabricators", the Prophet ﷺ having said none of it ^{7 8}. He also criticises those who reject explaining the Qur'an through science and call for "faithful submission" without rational argument, holding that "the essence of our religion is knowledge and reason" ⁸.

In this chapter the author compares phrases of the Gospel of Matthew in two versions he calls "the original" and "the falsified", holding that the second altered passages that attribute the killing of Christ to the chief priests and elders of the people ⁹. This is the author's claim; it has not been checked here, and no source yet identifies the editions he means.

• Citations use PDF page numbers; the printed numbers differ from them by a varying amount.
• The edition ends with a list of the author's books and a note on the 1970 State Prize ^{10 11}.