I'm much earlier in my education on Islam than I am in my education on Christianity or Judaism, which I expect is the norm for religious studies scholars who don't actually specialize in Islam (or in comparative religion) -- at least of my generation. For the younger generation, the ones who started school after 9/11, maybe it's different. On 9/11/2001, both my graduate career and my professional scholar career were already launched -- I was researching a Master's thesis on King David, and I had my first professional nonfiction assignment (the prefatory essay to a Mark Twain collection), which happened to be due 9/12/2001, a deadline that is for obvious reasons easy to remember. Though I remember some colleagues who were interested in the Nation of Islam and Islam in the African-American community, for instance, there was otherwise little discussion of American Islam, which is now receiving considerable attention in the scholarly community (and newspapers, every time some group of shitbirds protests the building or expansion of a mosque) after post-9/11 Islamophobia reinvigorated American Muslims.
But it seems particularly silly to be a religious studies scholar in 2015, nearly 2016, without a decent handle on Islam, and while just by virtue of being able to read a book with grown-up words in it I know more about Islam than the "ban all Muslims" knuckleheads, the prevalence of ignorance is not an excuse to lower standards -- there's no reason to grade on a curve here.
As with my early reading on Christianity or Judaism, my reading on Islam is a little scattershot, and I will eventually have to doubleback and reread things that will make new sense the second time through. (This is not the first book I've read on Islam, to be clear, just the first since starting this blog. My formal education, though, was limited to Medieval Islamic philosophy, so I don't have the same foundations that I do for discussing western religion and philosophy, the ancient Near East, or the development of religion in the US. In my own research prior to the last couple years, my primary interest in Islam has been with regard to its place in one of my ongoing areas of scholarly concern: the way orthodox Christianities [meaning principally the Catholic Church in this case] have defined themselves in terms of opposition to other belief sets, i.e. through the identification of heresies and so on. There are a lot of parallels between the early reception of the Latter Day Saints and that of Islam, by mainline Protestants in the first case and western Christianity in the second: "is this a kind of Christianity we're looking at? it claims to pray to the same God but also possesses a new scripture from that God." The reasons why everything played out differently from that point, and so on, well -- that would be a good subject for a book by someone better versed in both topics.)
Qur'an in Conversation:
This is a collection of essays, loosely sorted by theme, by Muslim scholars on different suras of the Qur'an. Though I wish the project were more global in scope, I understand why only North Americans (specifically Americans and Canadians, I think, but forgive me if I'm forgetting someone) were included. Virtually every page of it contradicts the popular press image of Islam as an ultraconservative and unchanging monolith.
Intellectually I knew that. Even when you insist on "taking the Qur'an [or the Bible] literally," there is always a necessary act of interpretation, because there is no language that is free of ambiguity, and putting centuries between the writer and the reader nearly always increases rather than decreases that ambiguity. The most conservative, most literalist possible version of Islam couldn't be monolithic, without strict centralized control (which would only control what people can say and act on, not what they believe), which simply does not exist. But there is knowing that this is true, and there is reading scholars' essays on the specifics of it.
Most of what I read here, I didn't mark any specific passages from. My takeaway was much more basic, along the nature of "oh okay, this is an example of how a modern feminist Muslim deals with the Qur'an." At my level of education, those basic takeaways are still the most important. The specifics are important for their demythologizing effect. But that's the thing, part of religious literacy, perhaps a large part, is avoiding the caricaturing and broad sketches of faith groups.
For instance, I'm not clear on how many people are aware that only 20% of the Muslim world is Arab. I think maybe a lot of educated people would have guessed that the Muslim world was at least not majority-Arab, given some time to mull it over, based on two things that should be part of the common knowledge canon: the role played here by the Indian subcontinent, and the fact that Christianity is no longer mainly a religion of Palestinian Jews, nor Buddhism mainly a religion of India. Among world religions, in other words, this is one of the models for becoming a world religion.
But one of the things most people seem to know about Islam is its insistence that the Qur'an is read in Arabic, the language in which it was revealed to Mohammad. This is one place where that "only 20%" becomes very important to our discussions of Islam, because the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not read the Qur'an in Arabic, and I have seen many, many people insisting that they do, and insisting on the dominance of a form of literalism or fundamentalism that a) simply is not dominant and b) is functionally impossible given the size of Islam and its many, many internal divisions.
The predominance of translated Qur'ans is important for a number of reasons. Biblical translation is an area the layman knows little enough about as it is -- you have only to glance at the headlines about the recent KJV draft discovery to realize that. But as complex an issue as Biblical translation is, Qur'anic translation is not only more complex, it is far more politicized, and involves state actors.
Anyway, on to some notes.
Emran El-Badawi:
"Within the Arabian sphere in which the Qur'an operates, Jews, Christians, and hanifs -- 'proto-Muslims' -- were competing with one another at times through Arabic oral tradition, at other times through forms of Aramaic writing. When the Qur'an identifies itself as 'clear Arabic language,' it acknowledges its existence in a multilingual context, hence the significance of the 'Arabic Qur'an.' Why would such descriptions have been significant if all members of its audience simply spoke Arabic? It would have been a nonissue. Such descriptions are a statement that THIS Scripture is in Arabic -- a new revelation to be added to Hebrew and Christian Scripture."
"One thing I argue in the first chapter of my book The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions is that there exists some serious sectarian and missionary activity in the environment of the Qur'an. Some Muslims feel uncomfortable when I say that, and fear that I am subjecting the text to a secularizing or even orientalist reading. In such cases I say, 'No, I'm reading the Qur'an and you're reading tafsir, the commentary that came about later on.' The Qur'an discusses the sectarianism of its day explicitly, a small sample of which can be gleaned from such words as shiqaq (division) and ahzab (parties) and when it talks about groups or sides. The Qur'an is adding its voice to a multiplicity of competing theological and legal schools and proposing its own to be the correct one."
I don't know how much I am reading in my Christian scholarship here, but this sounds similar to the role of the Gospels, which did not create Christianity -- even though moderns now treat them as the foundational Christian texts -- but were written by existing Christian communities to compete with, correct, or convert audiences away from other Christian communities which owed their existence to other written and oral sources.
"To push this argument further, some Muslims are hesitant to look at such texts as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or the Protevangelium of James. Muslim tradition is not based, as it were, on such texts but rather on exegetical, prophetic, and biographical literature -- tafsir, hadith, sirah, and so on -- which flourished about two centuries after the Qur'an. However, in the premodern Muslim scholarship of the ninth to sixteenth century, widely accepted authors like Ibn Qutaybah, Tabari, al-Suyuti, and others were looking at and debating the textual context with which the Qur'an is in dialogue. I say 'in dialogue' because it is talking to the audience of those texts. In the fifteenth century, in his multilvolume Tafsir, al-Biqa'i considers the canonical Gospels to be the injil referred to by the Qur'an. Most Muslims today would not agree with that. And yet this line of thought was afforded some space within Islam in the past."
Jamal Badawi:
Sura 9:5: "Kill the idolaters [mushrikin] wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, lie in wait for them at every place of ambush."
This is obviously one of the most incendiary lines in the Qur'an, one that both jihadists and Islamophobes will point to. But given that this religion has been around for a long time and that most of its members have not, in fact, called for the death of non-Muslims ... sometimes I can't believe I have to point this out, but in all religions there is, clearly, a long tradition of grappling with the challenging or the problematic, whether that means discounting something as simply wrong because we have moved on from its original historical context (as liberal -- and really, most moderate -- Christians do with the violence, homophobia, and misogyny of the Bible), or looking deeper to see if there might be another less problematic level of meaning.
That struggle is the sort of thing I have seen New Atheist writers dismiss as "cheating," as though somehow religious people have an obligation to live up to a cardboard stereotype. Let's be very clear: grappling with scripture in this way is not a modern preoccupation. It is a major component of the very substance of religious life and religious thought, and in every religious tradition with which I am at all familiar, you will find it dating to its earliest generations.
Badawi begins:
"This is one of the most misunderstood verses of the Qur'an, and so it offers an excellent opportunity for exploring an appropriate methodology of reading the Qur'an. The Qur'an describes itself as a book of guidance ... it tells its readers what to believe and how to behave. Yet there are some verses that can seem, at first glance, to be in tension with or even in contradiction to other parts of the Qur'an. Islamic tradition offers a way to approach these verses and to set them in the context of the larger message of Islam's holy book...
"First of all, in order to evaluate whether or not a given act or argument conforms to the normative teachings of Islam, there must be some criteria for such evaluations. How are these norms to be identified? In the case of Islam, the primary sources are the Qur'an and authentic or sound hadiths, which are reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad... These primary sources are supplemented by secondary sources of Islam. The generally agreed to sources are consensus of the scholars on a given issue, or ijmaa', and analogical deduction, or qiyaas. Secondary sources are not revelatory, even though they are based on interpretations of revelatory sources.
"... Next, a solid interpretation of the Qur'an must be based on a study of the text in its original Arabic form. Translation results in ambiguity. Furthermore, the Arabic language itself has evolved since the seventh century, and some words have changed in meaning...
"Historical context is another tool, particular what is termed the occasion of revelation of a particular verse. Some verses were revealed to address a particular situation or to settle a particular dispute. A knowledge of this context can help to understand a verse that otherwise might seem to be incoherent with the larger message of the Qur'an."
So there's some simple "how to use the Qur'an" takeaway here:
1: As with the Bible, it is inappropriate to pick a verse and use it in a vacuum -- the meaning of a verse has to be considered against the context of the text as a whole.
2: There are traditions of commentary and interpretation, just as Judaism has the Talmud or Christianity has the Church Fathers and later theologians (and a history of continuing to adopt new doctrine, cf. the Immaculate Conception). No religion is limited to its original text. That is not how people do religion.
Back to Badawi:
"Read in isolation ... it suggests that people who do not accept Islam deserve to die. We cannot say, as some extremists do, that this single verse cancels out all the Qur'anic verses that speak of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. The historical context reveals that the idolatrous Meccans had broken the treaty of Hudaybiyya, which they had made with the Muslims in Medina, and murdered peaceful Muslims. ... The treaty ... stipulated a ten-year truce between the two cities, but not all Meccans abided by the conditions of the treaty. By today's standards that would be considered a war crime. So now the verse is limited to those who had committed that aggression.
"To someone first reading this verse, without understanding its context, it may sound like a general principle, but this verse is limited to those who carried arms and killed innocent people.
"Another important word to notice in this verse is the word mushrikin in Arabic, often translated as 'nonbelievers' or even sometimes as 'infidels.' Some polemical, anti-Islamic writers claim that this refers to Jews and Christians and therefore enjoins a wholesale slaughter of these communities. In fact the Qur'an never uses the word mushrikin as an epithet for Jews or Christians. ... in this verse, the term mushrikin refers only to idolaters, specifically idolatrous Arabs, and of those, only the [treaty-breakers] who committed this atrocious act."
"Another principle for proper interpretation is that 'the few must be interpreted in light of the many.' For example, the Qur'an repeatedly affirms freedom of conscience and rejects compulsion in religion..."
That principle would do homophobic Christians a lot of good, given how little the Bible says about homosexuality -- the New Testament in particular -- and how much it says about judgment and compassion.
"Islamic tradition also includes the concept of nashk, which is often understood as abrogation but is more properly translated as supercession. A verse that was revealed later in time is understood to replace an earlier verse with which it seems to be in tension. In the case of 9:5, some have claimed that since it was revealed later than the earlier verses that promote harmony and peaceful aspirations with Jews and Muslims, 9:5 instituted a new policy of Muslims toward all non-Muslims. This argument does not hold because there are many verses that were revealed during the Medinan period that likewise endorse a relationship of respect and peace with the People of the Book."
And back to me:
Like I said, there was much more that I read here, it's just that a lot of it washed over me without my thinking to mark specific passages. But even these two essays, I think, offer so much food for thought.
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