The year 2012 of the Christian calendar marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Version of the Bible. To my knowledge there is only one book in any single language that has had a greater influence in the world, and that book is the Qur’an.
The global influence of the King James Bible is largely the result of England and its daughter nations – the United States of America foremost among them — becoming major powers in the world, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Christian calendar.
The global influence of the Qur’an is largely the result of many nations of peoples from the Atlantic coast of Africa in the west to the islands of Indonesia in the east accepting Islam. Several of those nations were liberated from the brutal and oppressive Roman and Iranian empires, and others – such as Spain and India – were conquered, but the vast majority of nations accepted Islam in peace. Even in conquered nations, the people were not forcibly converted, and the peoples formerly dominated by Rome and Iran experienced freedom of worship for the first time. In Egypt, for example, three centuries passed before those who accepted Islam became a majority of the population.
An interesting comparison of the relative influence of the King James Bible and of the Qur’an in uniting peoples and nations is this: If, fourteen centuries ago, people who spoke the German language had had a book in their language comparable to the Qur’an, today all of the people of Germany, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, England and Iceland, and many of the people of Belgium and Switzerland, would be united by a common language. This is what has happened to the Arabic-speaking peoples of the world. The spoken languages (colloquial Arabic) of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Iraq have diverged, but the literary language used in printed and electronic media is the same from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, and is used globally.
In contrast, the King James Bible has failed to prevent the divergence of American from British English, and its language is no longer used as the common language in any medium – spoken, printed or electronic.
Long live the Qur’an!
Which Way Is Up? 