The basic text of The Quran is supplemented by the author’s introduction and comments as well as scientific commentary of the historian of Islamic culture Jānis Ešots. The book includes pictures from the Bursa Friday Mosque (The Great Assembly).
For thirteen and a half centuries The Quran is considered the Basic Text of the Arab culture, also by Christian Arabs who do not avoid engaging in theological discussions with their fellow-countrymen, and who nowadays quite unanimously admit that Mohammed’s scriptures are the „Soul of the Arab language” or the „Heart of our nation”. Yet the cultural and historical significance of Islam reaches far beyond that part of the world which is inhabited by “the noble nation”, “the Arab World”. The Quran and the religious and philosophical thought stemming out of it is and will always be a significant guideline for the spiritual path of humanity. The Quran is the „code” of the Islamic culture – without its system of concepts one can hardly comprehend the scale of spiritual values of Islam that has had influence on the major part of the world – nowadays, in fact, on all of the world. Latvian reader and researcher will undoubtedly take interest in this partly successful, partly unavoidably erroneous first attempt to interpret the code of the Islamic culture as close to the Latvian „traditions of sacred texts”, or the 300 years old tradition of rendering canonical texts, as possible.
Uldis Bērziņš