The Civilizational Function of the Quran: A Preliminary Investigation in the Field of the Early Civilization of Muslims

If we take a civilization to consist in a set of components organized on the basis of a fundamental thought and in terms of various systems, then the origins of such a fundamental thought in the Early Islamic Civilization were Islamic Revelatory (Waḥyānī) doctrines the core of which appears in the Quran. Thus the Quran was the epistemic foundation, the logic of composition, the determinant of how parts of this civilization are related, and the guide for the main direction of the Islamic civilization. This result can be supported by an internal look at the Quran and an investigation of its civilizational doctrines, on the one hand, and an external look at the facts of the matters regarding the Islamic civilization, and the Quran’s functions and roles in it. In this paper, I concern myself to the latter issue, that is the civilizational function of the Quran. I examine this in terms of two main axes: the Quran’s impact on the spirit and directions of the Islamic civilization, and its impact on parts and manifestations of the Islamic civilization. Within the latter axis, I examine sciences, arts, and ecological circumstances of Muslims and their social lives. I conclude that if Quranic doctrines are ignored in social lives of Muslims and are restricted to intellectual issues irrelevant to social needs, then the Islamic civilization will cease to exist. However, the current civilizational circumstances of the human kind and the historical shifts of civilizations can pave the path for the reappearance of the Quran in the Islamic civilization and its centrality in the new Islamic civilization.