The event, which annuls what has held until now – the standing order – proves just as incalculable and abrupt as a natural disaster or act of God. It defies all calculation and prediction. When it occurs, an entirely new state of affairs begins. The event brings into play an outside, which breaks the subject open and wrests it from subjection. Events represent breaks and discontinuities; they open up new spaces for action.
Byung-Chul Han
To inaugurate a rupture with the prevailing hegemonic modes-of-being, the Qur’ān is in itself is revealed as a rupture. It is an event. It is miraculous, not only in the sense that it ruptures natural laws but also in its rupture with the existing regimes of knowledge (epistemologies); i.e. jāhiliyyah, oppressive orders (politico-economic and social systems) i.e., the tāghūt; and their narrow metaphysical horizons i.e. dunyā, and as such it breaches the narrow horizons that constitute the prevailing order which ostensibly presents itself as closed and divine. That is to say, the Qur’ān is revealed from exteriority (which means that which originates outside of the hegemonic regimes). The critical point here is that this new consciousness, having been revealed from exteriority, amounted to nothing short of a new existential orientation: a new way of being-in-the-world in the sense that the Qur’ān not only addresses the why of existence but also the how.
The Qur’ān is an event in that it is revealed (tanzīl) and is also named as al-Furqān (3:4) which means the decisive criterion that affirms the distinction between truth and falsehood and has also been translated as the “Decisive
Authority” in that it negates existing epistemic and political modes of authority (false gods) and inaugurates a new authority grounded solely in divine revelation that is interpreted, not by the epistemic or political
sovereignty of a state but by a dynamic community through ijtihād and shura. It is a revelation of God from Himself about Himself as opposed to the domesticated images of God that prevail and legitimize hegemonic and oppressive
orders.
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