About
While most treatments of the Qur’an assume Traditionalist Islam’s conclusions, The Qur’an: A Complete Revelation does not.
The purpose behind this presentation and explication of the Qur’an — that is, a presentation and explication not predicated upon the civilisational development(s) which we call Islam — was to provide legal support for execution of the Qur’an’s own protocol of warning as a means of establishing ontologically the culpability of temporal rulers. Evidence of this mechanism is explicit in the Qur’an, but elided by mainstream Islam and deemphasised in the literature upon which it is based. Since the Qur’an itself is the source of this legal-ontological mechanism of warning — and given that all strains of Islam agree upon the veracity of the Qur’an and not much besides — it was not possible to endorse any single school as a basis for the project of leveraging this mechanism in respect of the present ruling elite.
Accordingly, it was necessary to approach the Qur’an not as the scripture claimed as foundational by a number of civilisational social groupings both in the past and in the present and upon which various edifices have been erected but as an entity equal to its own claims: to be from God; to be preserved; to be fully detailed; which openly challenges the reader to apply reason to it.
This translation, then, is oriented to the purpose of providing the legal-ontological basis for execution of its mechanism of warning to temporal rulers, and is defined hermeneutically by the premises just listed.
Thus, the project’s premises dictated that the analysis be grounded in the Qur’an as — to use modern parlance — a complete data set.
While Islam as a civilisational phenomenon today deprecates or proscribes any approach to the text other than via long-held conclusions, the objective was not to attack or undermine any of the myriad exoteric or esoteric streams of that civilisational tradition which, as an amalgam, go by that name. One acknowledges that within their proper context they express objective values and have ontologically valid applications — that context being a pre-modern society separate from European peoples. But since it was an eclectic and aggressive insistence upon ossified attitudes on the part of a worldview which (like all other pre-modern worldviews) has fallen prone before the god of material pragmatism — especially in the disjointed and essentially schizophrenic form in which it is imported into the West — which presented the greatest obstacle to the successful execution of this project, it was necessary to critique parts of the dogma which it claims to believe as it abandons those lands where it remains in vestigial form.
But there is a second reason for the approach taken here. A traditional exposition (even if one were able to decide definitively upon that strain of Islam upon which to build) is exactly that: traditional. It is not simply the case that it assumes a worldview that moderns do not appreciate or value. It is, rather, that moderns have lost the ability to grasp it in principle.
To expand upon this last point: we are living at this time in a world civilisation which is incapable of understanding almost anything of the inner truths held within the warp and woof of any pre-modern spiritual path, let alone that of Islam. We were finally cut off at the knees spiritually by the Enlightenment, and the modern person is trained to regard as superstition anything with no countable physical expression. We are, as French metaphysician René Guénon correctly noted, in the age of quantity; the notion of quality now being regarded as existing only subjectively. Therefore, the analysis, in order to demonstrate what might be regarded as evidence by a modern, had to be based in the language of the modern: that of quantity (meaning here: “objective” evidence elicited from the text by means of particular “objective” methods).
Again, it is not that one dismisses the work of the exegetes, legal minds, and metaphysicians within the Islamic traditions; it is that what they produced is addressed to a worldview which accepts the heart as the seat of the human reality and intellection (in the Guénonian sense) as a fact. Apprehension of the meaning of such things is simply beyond the range of the educated modern, and to ignore that fact is to embrace defeat before beginning.
The overriding objective of the project (i.e., utilising the Qur’an’s mechanism of warning as an ontological delineator between potential ignorance and objective culpability vis-à-vis a rulership class) therefore required the development of a new method of hermeneutics, one which does not assume a need to go outside the Qur’an for interpretation. Again, this was necessary not only due to modern man’s inability to perceive reality in anything other than quantitative terms, but also — and there is no point pretending otherwise — in order to preclude any conflation between this project and what is called Islam today. As Guénon understood (he, it should be noted, fully adopted Islamic traditions and initiations), all valid traditions are in — and can only be in — a state of deterioration at this point in history. To attempt to unpick the Gordian Knot of a revealed religion in a state of such decay would have made an already daunting undertaking backed by limited resources impossible.
Much more could be said, but we will leave this subject here. Instances of the hermeneutic principles which informed this process of engagement with the Qur’anic text follow.
First among them is what is termed in the work pan-textual analysis. This entails treating the Qur’an relentlessly on the basis of its internal claims — namely, that it is from God, preserved, consistent, and complete — leveraging the corpus of the text as a whole to establish word values for key terms which are consistent and apposite across all instances.
Another method leverages the fact that the Qur’an itself furnishes definitions for a number of key terms.
The outcome of the application of these and other hermeneutical tools is then used in the translation, and supporting evidence is listed in the notes along with a summary of where the result differs from what dominant voices in the world of Islam today have concluded.
The guiding objective was always to identify — and to provide legal-ontological support for — that mechanism in the Qur’an whereby miscreant and deviant rulers and their communities were held to account before God in the past, and then to initiate in the present a single, remaining implementation of the same mechanism implicit within the revelation and missions God gave to Muḥammad. The second book in the series, The God Protocol, identifies and demonstrates this mechanism in detail, and directs a formal notification based upon it to the miscreant and deviant elites of that unified system of governance by which the world is ruled today.
The third book in the series, The Mysterious Letters of the Qur’an: A Complete Solution, presents a convincing, cohesive, and logical description of the purposes and operations of those letters of a non-lexical character in the Qur’an which are called in Arabic al-ḥurūf al-muqaṭṭaʿāt (or the cut or disjointed letters), and more generally called the mysterious letters in English. While these letters have intrigued Muslims for over 1,400 years, the default position has been that an attempt to decode them is either futile or blasphemous. This work is submitted in support of — and by way of authentication of — the broader project aims as summarised in The God Protocol.
The full texts of The Qur’an: A Complete Revelation, The God Protocol, and The Mysterious Letters of the Qur’an: A Complete Solution may be downloaded free and printed for personal (non-commercial) use; alternatively, hardback copies may be purchased via Amazon.*
The author’s personal site is samgerrans.com.
This work is dedicated to the many people who contributed materially over the course of the project. It would not have been possible without them.
* Since the author has been debanked in the West, he is no longer able to receive anything from these sales.