英语听力：Prophet Muhammad 先知穆罕默德 - 7

 Muhammad's following began to grow. They called themselves Muslims for those who surrendered to God. They set out to preserve the message Muhammad had brought. This was the beginning of the Koran. 

 

The Koran was revealed orally, but very soon people realized that it had to be written down in order to make sure that it wasn’t corrupted¹ and that the original message was maintained. And from a very early day, and it’s very unclear when that day was, because no early manuscripts of the Koran survive, people began copying it down. 

 

The Koran is a revelation of spiritual teaching of both ethical² and social guidance. It was revealed and remains³ in Arabic. 

 

What's so extraordinary about the Koran is its naturalness, so that it can say the most powerful cosmic things with a sense of intimacy⁴, so that power and tenderness come together constantly in the Koranic language. 

 

With words alone, the Koran delivers a division to the faithful. Its imagery conjures⁵ a picture of the afterlife that resonates with all the power of traditional Bedouin poetry. 

 

Imagine yourself in the desert, surrounded by dust, by the glare of the sun. You wear cloaks to cover your body because the wind will just sear your skin right off your face and you walk into an oasis⁶. The temperature drops dramatically. There is a quiet there. The wind is no longer howling. Everywhere you look you see green and color. The world of water and paradise are symbolically⁷ tied to one another. And the Koran conjures that up with just a few briefly⁸ chosen words. 

 

Yet for all the imagery of paradise in the Koran, there was no easy description of God. The mystery would remain.

 

It's very difficult to talk about God without reifying God, reifying to make God into a thing or anthropomorphizing God, to make God into a projection⁹ of our own human self. And that's why Muslims don’t like sculpture, for example, traditionally, because they believe that there is that danger. And the Koran avoids that by constantly shifting the pronouns, so we can't really reify God, and get an image, a physical image of God.

1 corrupted   

（使）败坏( corrupt的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）腐化； 引起（计算机文件等的）错误； 破坏

参考例句：

• The body corrupted quite quickly. 尸体很快腐烂了。
• The text was corrupted by careless copyists. 原文因抄写员粗心而有讹误。

2 ethical   

adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的

参考例句：

• It is necessary to get the youth to have a high ethical concept.必须使青年具有高度的道德观念。
• It was a debate which aroused fervent ethical arguments.那是一场引发强烈的伦理道德争论的辩论。

3 remains   

n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹

参考例句：

• He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
• The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。

4 intimacy   

n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行

参考例句：

• His claims to an intimacy with the President are somewhat exaggerated.他声称自己与总统关系密切，这有点言过其实。
• I wish there were a rule book for intimacy.我希望能有个关于亲密的规则。

5 conjures   

用魔术变出( conjure的第三人称单数 )； 祈求，恳求； 变戏法； （变魔术般地） 使…出现

参考例句：

• The word 'birthday' conjures up images of presents and parties. “生日”这个词使人想起礼物和聚会的情景。
• The name Sahara conjures up images of a desert of aridity. "撒哈拉"这个名字使人想起干旱的沙漠情景。

6 oasis   

n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方

参考例句：

• They stopped for the night at an oasis.他们在沙漠中的绿洲停下来过夜。
• The town was an oasis of prosperity in a desert of poverty.该镇是贫穷荒漠中的一块繁荣的“绿洲”。

7 symbolically   

ad.象征地，象征性地

参考例句：

• By wearing the ring on the third finger of the left hand, a married couple symbolically declares their eternal love for each other. 将婚戒戴在左手的第三只手指上，意味着夫妻双方象征性地宣告他们的爱情天长地久，他们定能白头偕老。
• Symbolically, he coughed to clear his throat. 周经理象征地咳一声无谓的嗽，清清嗓子。

8 briefly   

adv.简单地，简短地

参考例句：

• I want to touch briefly on another aspect of the problem.我想简单地谈一下这个问题的另一方面。
• He was kidnapped and briefly detained by a terrorist group.他被一个恐怖组织绑架并短暂拘禁。

9 projection   

n.发射，计划，突出部分

参考例句：

• Projection takes place with a minimum of awareness or conscious control.投射在最少的知觉或意识控制下发生。
• The projection of increases in number of house-holds is correct.对户数增加的推算是正确的。