Response by Mubashir Inayat(On Quransmessage.com Facebook Page)
http://www.facebook.com/QuransmessageThanks Brother. Curious to explore it further, instead going through Muhammad Asad's translation (without footnotes) on the web, I picked up a hard copy of his "The Message of the Qur'an" and just read an explanatory footnote that says:
4 The classical commentators assume that the above words are addressed specifically to the Prophet, and that, therefore, they relate to his being taught the Qur'an and being promised that he would not forget anything thereof, "save what God may will [thee to forget]". This last clause has ever since given much trouble to the commentators, inasmuch as it is not very plausible that He who has revealed the Qur'an to the Prophet should cause him to forget anything of it. Hence, many unconvincing explanations have been advanced from very early times down to our own days, the least convincing being that last refuge of every perplexed Qur'an-commentator, the "doctrine of abrogation" (refuted in my note 87 on 2:106). However, the supposed difficulty of interpretation disappears as soon as we allow ourselves to realize that the above passage, though ostensibly addressed to the Prophet, is directed at man in general, and that it is closely related to an earlier Qur'anic revelation - namely, the first five verses of surah 96 ("The Germ-Cell") and, in particular, verses 3-5, which speak of God's having "taught man what he did not know". In note 3 on those verses I have expressed the opinion that they allude to mankind's cumulative acquisition of empirical and rational knowledge, handed down from generation to generation and from one civilization to another: and it is to this very phenomenon that the present passage, too, refers. We are told here that God, who has formed man in accordance with what he is meant to be and has promised to guide him, will enable him to acquire (and thus, as it were, "impart" to him) elements of knowledge which mankind will accumulate, record and collectively "remember" - except what God may cause man to "forget" (in another word, to abandon) as having become redundant by virtue of his new experiences and his acquisition of wider, more differentiated elements of knowledge, empirical as well as deductive or speculative, including more advanced, empirically acquired skills. However, the very next sentence makes it clear that all knowledge arrived at through our observation of the external world and through speculation, though necessary and most valuable, is definitely limited in scope and does not, therefore, in itself suffice to give us an insight into ultimate truths.
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Wonder if Br Asad has a point here?
Response by Mubashir Inayat(On Quransmessage.com Facebook Page)
http://www.facebook.com/Quransmessage"The Message of the Qur'an" complete in PDF format can be read here:
http://asadullahali.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/the-message-of-the-quran.pdfResponse by Mubashir Inayat(On Quransmessage.com Facebook Page)
http://www.facebook.com/QuransmessageTo get another perspective, I also looked up Parwez, who says:
87:7 - If it were the will of Allah, you could have forgotten something from it (or ignore it), but (as has been mentioned earlier in 17:86) that was not His will. That is why you cannot forget or ignore anything from it. This has been so ordained.
The Wahi has been revealed from Allah Who knows what the latent potentialities in a human being are and how these can be developed. (Therefore this Wahi is complete in every way and sufficient for the purpose it has been revealed.) Wahi is revealed for the development of human self (personality).
http://www.tolueislam.org/Parwez/expo/expo_087.htm