53:2-sam's note
53:2-sam's note . 53:2 Your companion has not strayed, nor has he erred,1(sam) 1-The portion which follows deals with an encounter beyond the common experience of men. The Traditionalist has, naturally, a stock of stories to which he refers here, but which seem to me a distraction from the main point. What Muḥammad personally saw, I do not know. I do not need to know; I know what matters: that it was a true encounter. What men choose to write about it after the fact is of little interest to me, and in no way changes what for me is a key point of this chapter, which is quite the reverse of what the Traditionalist claims for it. The Traditionalist says that the principal subject here is the Angel Gabriel. Frankly, an untrained reading more readily suggests that the subject is God. Since the subject at 53:10 is obviously (and by common consent) God, absent a firm textual marker, one inclines to the view that God is the subject at 53:5-9 also. For me, confirmation of the key lesson of ...