Читать книгу Why I Am a Salafi - Michael Muhammad Knight - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get mixed up and lost in the course of night. — Jorge Luis Borges1
A, L, M. — The Qur’n, 2:1
DURING THE AYAHUASCA visions, I had asked about the Qur’n, and I was told—either by the Qur’n’s transcendent author, or the spirit of the sacred vine, or just the dimethyltryptamine working with my brain chemicals, a message from my own self to my own self, whatever—to leave the words alone. Returning to the reality of the sober, however, the Qur’n and its words were all that I had. In my post-ayahuasca prayer, I recited the text for a trace of what I had felt, commemorating the traumas and ecstasies of ayahuasca. The words weren’t exactly words at that point.
As time pulled me further away from the chemical mountaintop, I grew more reliant on the words, but in ways that the chemicals had enabled. Feeling as though ayahuasca had washed my insides clean and opened me to the chance at a new encounter with the divine words, I decided to reconsider the Qur’n in a serious way. The plan was to place myself in a one-on-one encounter with the Qur’n, in which I would take the time to produce my own translation, verse by verse.
My project had one guiding assumption that would seem natural for engaging any text: that the primary way for me to approach the Qur’n was as a source of discursive content to be investigated and understood. This was what it meant for me to have a personal experience of the Qur’n. Assisted only by my dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances, I wanted to plunge deep into every word and retrieve everything that I could before proceeding to the next. I wasn’t so naive to think that I could capture the meaning of the Qur’n in some absolute, authoritative sense that transcended my own abilities and resources, nor did I share the Salaf confidence in language that could allow such a fantasy. At most, I hoped for an encounter with the Qur’n that was my own.
This emphasis on content is not the only way to approach the Qur’n. It’s not necessarily the same experience that I would have while reciting the Qur’n in prayer, with or without drugs; or struggling to program large portions of the Qur’n into my memory without prioritizing comprehension; or visually experiencing the Qur’n as calligraphy on the wall of a mosque, stylized and abstracted to the point of virtual unreadability; or writing the Qur’n on cloth, washing the ink away, and then drinking the water as a means of physically ingesting the Qur’n. Treating the Qur’n as an intellectual project resonated with my youthful conception of Islam: a religion determined by divine instructions that have been made easily available to us in book form. If someone were to say the word Qur’n, I would first imagine a book, and specifically a modern book, a mass-printed paper artifact of commerce. This itself might be a more radical departure from the origins than I can appreciate.
Before attempting to read and interpret, my first question was whether the Qur’n encouraged or even allowed interpretation of itself. I turned to a contested verse on the matter, the seventh verse of the third sra:
It is he who sent down the Book to you. In it are clear verses—they are the foundation of the Book—and others unclear. As for those in whose hearts is deviation, they will follow that of which is unclear, seeking discord and seeking an interpretation. And no one knows its interpretation except Allh. And those firm in knowledge say, “We believe in it. All of it is from our lord.” And no one will be reminded except those of understanding.
The “you” to whom the book was sent is expressed with the singular masculine suffix ka, which designates its addressee as male. The Qur’n makes frequent shifts in perspective: The man who has been addressed as “you” in this verse is referred to as “he” in others, while the divine “he” who has sent the book in 3:7 is sometimes “we” and occasionally “I.”2
Verse 3:7 informs me that the Book’s umm, its foundation or basis (or “mother”), consists of the mukamt, the clear verses. Mukamt comes from the same -k-m root as terms associated with wisdom and judgment. The words used in reference to “unclear” verses, mutashbiht and tashbaha, could also be translated as “allegorical.” The clear verses are the wise and authoritative, while the obscure can say one thing but mean another. According to this verse, trying to interpret the unclear verses produces discord. The word used here for “discord,” fitna, would become the paradigmatic Muslim term for mischief and infighting; the violent power struggles that devastated early caliphates and left the Muslims forever divided are described as the Fitnas, and charges of fitna are employed to this day to shut down conversations that threaten the status quo. The word for “interpretation,” ta’wl, comes from the same a-w-l root as awl, “first”; to interpret means that we seek a return to the origins.
This verse warns that obsessing over the obscure can only cause deviation and chaos, but then renders itself obscure, as ambiguities in the Arabic allow for two radically opposed translations for a segment of the verse:
1. No one knows its interpretation except Allh. And those firm in knowledge say, “We believe in it. All of it is from our lord.”
2. No one knows its interpretation except Allh and those firm in knowledge. They say, “We believe in it. All of it is from our lord.”
Both versions offer precise and “literal” translations, despite the dramatic difference in their consequences. The Qur’n’s orality comes into play here: Though it sometimes refers to itself (as in this verse) as al-Kitb, “the Book” or more precisely “the Writing,” its more recognized self-identification is of course al-Qur’n, “the Reciting” (in contrast to the Bible, which is always called al-Kitb). Because the Arabic script does not have periods or commas, sound holds as much power as sight in producing the Qur’n’s meaning: When I recite this verse in Arabic, pausing to breathe can change the message. Depending on a full stop after Allh’s name, I find different answers to the question of what a human being can know from the Qur’n. Do those “firm in knowledge” passively accept the Qur’n’s authority without interrogation of its unclear verses, or can they understand what remains mysterious to everyone else?
For Muslim thinkers who sought an expansion of the Qur’n’s possibilities, whether theologians such as al-Ghazl, philosophers such as Ibn Rushd (Averröes), or mystics such as al-Kashn, reciting 3:7 without a full stop after Allh’s name suggested the existence of an elite class of knowers who could comprehend the difficult verses.3 As we might expect, interpreters tended to identify those elite readers as the ones whose methods and arguments they shared. For philosophers, the “firm in knowledge” were philosophers, who could more fully comprehend the highest truths of the Qur’n, which the Qur’n cloaked in crude allegories so that it could speak to common believers and their undeveloped intellects. For mystics, 3:7 authorized mystical modes of knowledge, a privileged access to esoteric meanings through dreams, visionary experiences, and inspired intuition. For the traditionalist scholars whom modern Salafs would count in their lineage, claims of VIP access to the Qur’n’s meanings threatened the supremacy of Allh’s words and demoted the Salaf’s understanding of them as incomplete.
If there were indeed gifted knowers, who could claim to belong among their ranks? I wasn’t going there. But even if I sought refuge in Allh from the unclear verses, 3:7 still presents a problem: identifying which verses should be marked as “unclear” and thus avoided. This matter itself is left unclear, since verses do not typically make straightforward declarations that they belong to one category or the other. In perhaps the Qur’n’s supreme irony, the verse in which we learn that some verses are clear and others are unclear is itself an unclear verse. If we read an unclear verse as telling us to avoid interpretation of unclear verses, what are we supposed to do? The verse tells me, “DO NOT READ THIS VERSE,” performing a double-bind, and shows that even divine revelations can play cruel literary jokes.
Numerous verses in the Qur’n could be considered unclear because they consist only of disconnected and seemingly random Arabic letters. Some readers, however, would find the meaning of these “mystery letters” to be obvious, either through scholarly or mystical methods of analysis. If the Prophet shows up in a dream and tells you what the letters mean, what can be unclear about them? Other verses might be ambiguous because they describe Allh’s attributes, which later became a crucial point of division among Muslim thinkers; adth-based traditionalists condemned philosophers for using 3:7 to allegorize Allh’s throne and his sitting upon it.4 Linguists argued with each other over the meaning of specific words, despite the Qur’n’s assurances that it had come down in “plain Arabic.” Some questioned what it meant for the Qur’n to label itself an Arabic text while containing words that they perceived to be foreign (for example, one of the names for the hellfire, Jahennam, is said to be Ethiopian). But what if we’re mindful of the problems with reading, seeing the fallacies for which both premodern traditionalists and postmodern literary theorists would undermine claims upon the text’s essence? Depending on how you feel about the attempt to capture meaning from texts, every verse is capable of ambiguity.
Because I don’t think in Arabic, I must translate the Qur’n; but every translation is an attempt to interpret the unclear, potentially violating 3:7’s command. Translators perform work upon the Qur’n to make it comprehensible for greater numbers of people and can do this only by replacing the words that the Qur’n chose for itself. For al-Ghazl, enhanced access to the Qur’n was precisely the reason to avoid translation: Opening the Qur’n to non-Arabic speakers only exposed it to misinterpretation by unqualified readers. Translation can have dangerous theological consequences, for which al-Ghazl warned against translating the verses that seemed to describe God in anthropomorphic terms: Since no translation could perfectly capture all the subtleties of the original Arabic, translation only heightened the threat of misreading difficult verses.5
Despite the proliferation of Qur’n translations today, many Muslims maintain that the speech of Allh cannot be expressed in another language, and pious translators often give their work titles such as The Meanings of the Holy Qur’n rather than just The Qur’n. This doubt in the Qur’n’s translatability does not have to be a theologically invested claim: I want to reject the Qur’n’s translation for the same reason that scholarly study of Beowulf requires specialized training in Old English. The Qur’n rewritten in new words and another author’s voice cannot be the Qur’n. “Fundamentalist” scripturalism and critical theories of translation find themselves in agreement here.
A language cannot be reduced to a glossary of words for which we should expect every other language to provide its own glossary that lines up perfectly, term for term. There’s always something speculative to translation, always a gap that must be filled with educated guesses. I would have to wonder, then, about the possibilities for a Salaf theory of translation. As long as Salaf scholars are willing to subject the Qur’n to their translation, they cannot be reduced to pure literalists. When Salafs translate Qur’nic verses into other languages for their polemical pamphlets, aren’t they subjecting the words to their own rationalist investigation and ultimately replacing the exact words of divine speech with their personal opinions about what Allh intends to say? For their arguments to rely on support from the Qur’n, which a significant majority of Muslims worldwide cannot read for comprehension in its original Arabic, Salafs must alter the words. For the Qur’n to be shoehorned into the shape that Salafs and other communities demand of it in an increasingly globalized world—a universal message that can be accepted and then obeyed by the entirety of the human race, all cultures and societies everywhere without distinction of time or place—the Qur’n must necessarily adapt and become other than its own self.
Regardless of these challenges, Salaf networks have confidently flooded the world with presentations of the Qur’n in every language. The Hilali-Khan translation, presently favored by the Saudi government’s Qur’n-printing complexes and distribution channels, has become notorious for playing the “parentheses” game, in which the translated verses are supplemented with the translator’s own commentary, which appears within parentheses. The parenthesized comments, rather than clearly exposing themselves as the translator’s interpretation, are disguised as part of the verse: The translator implies that what’s inside the parentheses can also be found on the divinely revealed Arabic side of the page. One of the most troublesome cases could be found in the seventh verse of the Qur’n’s opening sra, which reads in the Hilali-Khan translation as “The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (those) who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor or those who went astray (such as the Christians).”6 When I read the verse in Arabic, I don’t see any words that specifically signify Jews or Christians.
Even Salafs, despite their supposed literalism, sometimes feel compelled to explain their choices. In the case of two verses that a Salaf author cites to prove that Allh exists above the heaven (67:16–17), he clarifies that while a precise translation of the verses would place Allh in the heaven (fi’l-sam’), we know that the verses really mean “above,” because of course Allh cannot be surrounded by his creation.7
If Salafs wanted to interrogate the legitimacy of translation by their own methods, the answer would be to look for precedents among the earliest Muslims. It does not appear that a mass influx of non-Arabic-speaking converts who could have made the Qur’n’s translation an issue was desirable or even thinkable in the first generations: The earliest Muslims saw Islam primarily as an “Arab thing,” since the Qur’n was addressed to Arabs in their own language. Contrary to the myth of Islam spreading “by the sword,” it doesn’t seem that the desire to expand Muslim territory had anything to do with a desire to convert people, whether forcibly or otherwise. I am confronted by the Qur’n’s own words, which can be translated to say, “We have sent no messenger except with the tongue of his people, that he might make all clear to them” (5:44–48). Repeatedly identifying itself as an Arabic Qur’n, the Qur’n seems to relate its Arabic language to clarity and accessibility (12:2, 16:103, 26:195, 39:28, 41:3, 43:3, 46:12), which could suggest that translation only obscures the content and makes it less clear—and perhaps that the Qur’n did not originally express the claim of universalism that later readers would make on its behalf.
There is nonetheless a narrative, though not found in the major adth sources, that depicts Muammad as authorizing the translation of the Qur’n’s opening sra for Persian-speaking believers. This sra happens to be crucial to the performance of required prayers, and there are reports of Muslims from the first three centuries praying in Persian prior to learning sufficient Arabic. If the account of Muammad allowing translation of this particular sra into Persian is a fabrication, it might have been created to answer a controversy regarding Muslim ritual. In the second century of Islam, the seminal jurist Ab anfa allowed recitation of the sra in Persian, a permission that he first granted unconditionally and then narrowed to those Muslims who did not yet have knowledge of Arabic.8
I wanted to submerge myself within the Qur’n and read it purely on its own terms, but the Qur’n does not have “its own terms.” As literature scholar David Bellos has remarked, “No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it.”9 When the Qur’n mentions trees, the heavens and earth, men, women, orphans, angels, prophets, greed, mercy, and Allh, it requires me to apply knowledge that does not exist within the Qur’n. As the Qur’n constructs its meaning through words whose meanings are determined outside its covers, I cannot explain any word in the Qur’n without using other words. Perhaps this should have been self-evident when I leaned on a stack of dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances for my “Qur’n as the best commentary on itself” project, or my own experience of life on this planet to understand what the Qur’n means when it mentions a “garden” or “fire.” I cannot speak of an unmediated encounter with the Qur’n, because every word finds meaning through whatever stands between it and myself.
Orientalist scholars have sometimes treated the Qur’n, particularly its larger sras, as structurally incoherent, charging that the Qur’n throws clusters of verses together without regard for how they relate to each other. This assumption has been challenged with closer reads of specific sras, primarily in works by non-Muslim scholars aimed at making the Qur’n’s text more accessible for non-Muslim readers.10 For my project, I decided to start with the fifty-third sra, popularly titled al-Najm (“the Star”), because this sra offers some meat on the question of gendering divinity. During my ayahuasca visions, Allh appeared as what could be called the “divine feminine,” though the Qur’n refers to Allh exclusively with male pronouns and can be read as condemning anyone who conceptualizes divinity as feminine. The fifty-third sra contains some of the Qur’n’s most heated attacks on goddess worship, even dismissing the notion that angels could be female (it appears that the pre-Islamic goddesses were believed to be Allh’s daughters and/or angels). Belief in Allh having daughters is rejected as an insult to the divine, as the fifty-third sra notes that humans prefer sons. Amid the Qur’n’s androcentrism, what could it mean that the Qur’n’s divine “he” spoke to me as a woman? I also found the fifty-third sra compelling because it discusses what could be a direct encounter between Muammad and Allh, though most interpreters would avoid the troublesome theological implications and instead assert that Muammad had seen the angel Jibril (Gabriel). For its description of this meeting between the Prophet and a supernatural Somebody, the fifty-third sra might resonate with those of us who have traveled the entheogen road.
So I began to read, starting with the sra’s introduction, “Bismillhir Ramnir Ram”: “In the Name of God, Ramn, the Merciful.” People usually translate ar-Ramn as something like “compassionate” or “gracious,” but there’s reason to suggest that it’s actually a proper name that originated in southern Arabia and was associated with pre-Islamic monotheism there. In the Qur’n’s description of unbelievers in 25:60, it would seem that ar-Ramn was regarded as a new, alien deity, distinct from the Allh that was already worshiped in Mecca: “And when it is said to them, ‘Prostrate to ar-Ramn,’ they say, ‘And what is ar-Ramn? Should we prostrate to that which you order us?’” In 17:110, the Qur’n clears up the confusion, clarifying that ar-Ramn and Allh are in fact the same being: “Call upon Allh or call upon ar-Ramn. Whichever you call, to him belong the best names.” Early in the Qur’n’s unfolding, Allh became the dominant name, appearing nearly three thousand times in the text, compared to fifty-seven appearances for ar-Ramn (not counting the Bismillhir Ramnir Ram in the superscriptions of sras).
Following the introductory Bismillh, the first numbered verse of the sra is a short Wa-l-najmi idh haw (“By the star when it falls”). Prior to making persuasive arguments, the Qur’n often attests to its own claims through oaths. The oath verses generally accompany issues of particular gravity, such as punishments in this world or the next. In 53:1, the oath is not by the star’s usefulness for human navigation, or its beauty as an adornment of heaven, or even the star itself; we are to look not at the light, but the dark. Our attention is called not to the star’s glory, but the moment at which it becomes absent. We are asked to consider the star’s lack. The Qur’n swears by the event of the star’s full exposure as impermanent and thus unworthy of worship.
If the oath by a star in 53:1 is part of the sra’s polemic against astral worship, it might be notable that although the peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia had names for hundreds of stars, the Qur’n mentions only one star specifically by its name: al-Shi’r (Sirius, Canis Majoris), the brightest fixed star (confession: The Qur’n itself does not explain that al-Shi’r is a specific star, or a star at all; as with everything else, the reference can have no meaning without outside sources). The mention occurs later in this sra (53:49), as the Qur’n asserts that Allh is “the lord of Sirius” (rabb al-Shi’r). It could be reasonable to see al-Shi’r as the star by which the Qur’n swears in 53:1, which would also connect the start of the sra to its later polemic against idolatry.
Using the tafsr al-Qur’n bi-l-Qur’n method—meaning that I treated the Qur’n’s text as the best commentary on itself—to get a sense of what the najm might have signified in 53:1, I went heavy into mentions of stars throughout the Qur’n. In another sra, Abraham briefly worships a star as his god, only to realize his error when the star disappears from view. To my eyes, 53:1 read as the Qur’n swearing by the inauthenticity of false gods and the impermanence of every object of worship other than Allh, the darkness that comes when lesser lights flicker out.
With its mention of a star, 53:1 at least offers the illusion of a universal, because there are such things as stars within my frame of reference. I can register the verse as though it’s speaking to me in my present, calling my attention to what I can directly observe. Of course, whatever meaning the word star conveys is a social construct and thus historically unstable. I live in an age that produces a particular knowledge about stars: When I look at a star, I cannot perceive it through the science and culture of seventh-century Mecca. Nonetheless, it’s easy enough to suspend this awareness and read star as signifying a self-evident, natural reality, as though every person throughout history who has ever looked up at the night sky has experienced these celestial phenomena in basically the same way. I have the luxury of pretending that to read the Qur’n’s najm as “star,” I am only rewriting an Arabic word as its best plain-sense match in English, rather than translating an experience across space and time.
With 53:2, however, the illusion collapses, and my reading hits the wall:
Ma alla ibukum wa m ghaw
(“Your companion has not strayed, nor has he erred.”)
Who is this person that the Qur’n calls my ib, my companion? I can look at the sky and think that I know what the Qur’n means by star, but I cannot know this supposed ib. To my eyes, the verse reads almost as sarcasm, because this companion cannot be my companion. I have never met my ib, except in dreams and drug visions. The Qur’n rubs this in my face.
Something gets lost in the translated your, because English has only one your, regardless of number or gender. When the Qur’n refers to my ib, it expresses the second-person possessive with the plural masculine suffix, kum. The Qur’n here reminds me that I am not its only reader; I am one man among many men for whom he is a companion. In ibukum, a homosocial bond is assumed: ibukum could be translated as “the male companion of you men.” Because the masculine plural also serves as an inclusive, generic plural, kum would be used to address a mixed group of both men and women, but we don’t know who is there: This kum is not changed by the presence or absence of women.
I do not know the name that my companion was given at birth, but the Qur’n calls him both Muammad and Amad. Sra 47 is traditionally called Muammad, though sra titles are not part of the Qur’n proper. The text of the Qur’n mentions my companion by name five times: four for Muammad, one for Amad. The discrepancy of names has led some scholars to suggest that Muammad, signifying an object of praise, was an honorific title, not a birth name. At any rate, in these five appearances, Muammad’s role overwhelms the details of his person. The Qur’n tells us that Muammad is the messenger of Allh (48:29); that he is the messenger of Allh and seal of prophets, despite the fact that he is not the father of any men (33:40); that he is nothing but a messenger, and other messengers before him have died (3:144); that those who believe in what has been sent down to him will have their misdeeds erased (47:2); and that Jesus foretold to his people the coming of one who would be named Amad (61:6). Other than that, we don’t get much information. The Qur’n tells me almost nothing concrete about my companion.
In contrast, Musa/Moses is mentioned by name 136 times. Ibrahim/Abraham is mentioned 69 times, as is Jesus (who is called by three names: ‘sa, al-Mash, and Ibn Maryam). Nuh/Noah is mentioned 43 times; Yusuf/Joseph and Lot/Lut, 27 each; Hud, 25; Sulayman/Solomon, 17. Harun/Aaron is mentioned 6 times. The Qur’n even says Pharaoh’s name more than that of Muammad (and all prophets except for Moses) at 76. Iblis, the Devil, is mentioned 11 times by name, more than twice the instances of Muammad’s name; this does not even include references to Iblis as shayn. From a superficial first glance, it would appear as though Muammad is not the central character in the Qur’n.
When the Qur’n speaks of my companion, it is usually to argue for its own legitimacy. Such is the case with 53:2; the Qur’n mentions only my companion, the means by which we have access to the Qur’n, to say that he has not gone astray or spoken from his own desire. Both of the Qur’n’s other uses of ibukum, “your companion,” serve this concern, promising that there is nothing in him from a jinn (34:46) and that he is not majnn, “jinn-possessed” (81:22). Some Muslims, arguing that Muammad should not be seen as representing the crucial essence of Islam, choose to emphasize the Qur’n’s paucity of direct references to him.
There’s another way to look at it: The Qur’n is always talking about Muammad and his community, because even if people hold the Qur’n to be eternal and universal, the words must still make sense in their own world. A close read might suggest that the Qur’n employs previous prophets as stand-ins for Muammad; when the Qur’n speaks of the rejection and mockery of Noah by his people, we are supposed to learn something about Muammad’s experience. In Muammad’s time, the consistency of these stories—a prophet comes to warn his people, they ignore him, and Allh subsequently removes them from the planet via natural disasters—would have served as a warning to the people of Mecca. The Qur’n asks that its audience consider the fate of these previous peoples. If Moses dominates the Qur’n’s stories, it could lead us to consider that Moses, more than any other prophet, reflects the prophetic archetype in which the Qur’n casts Muammad.
It is usually the people around Muammad that we call ab; for the Qur’n to call him ibukum reorients our perspective. For his ab, 53:2 referred to a man with whom they walked, spoke, and ate. My companion, as I know him, has no face; he is more or less a fictional character in my dreams. For the companions of my companion, he had a face that could be observed and remembered; after his death, they shared memories of his eyes, cheeks, hair and beard, complexion, and even the sweetness of his breath. Muammad was their companion in lived reality beyond the verses, so it could not have been the Qur’n alone that made him their ib. Instead of decentering Muammad, therefore, his apparent marginalization in the Qur’n threatens to decenter us. We can choose to read ourselves as addressees of the your in your companion, or we can find the Qur’n speaking to its moment with an immediacy that pushes us out. The Qur’n first addressed people who did not need more information regarding a man who lived among them (or the man himself, who did not need to have his own biography reported to him). Grounded in its own urgent present—promising an end of the world that could come at any second and asking how believers might react if Muammad dies in the days to come, while neglecting to offer plans for such a scenario—we could question the Qur’n’s investment in its future readers. Reflecting on what the Qur’n does not say, the points at which it displays no need to contextualize itself or explain its references, I confront the gulf between the Qur’n’s world and mine: The Qur’n speaks to a here and now that I cannot touch. The Qur’n describes Allh’s production and storage of knowledge in terms of pens and tablets; relying on the technology of its moment, the divine archive cannot shift to digital storage or even graduate from papyrus to paper.
According to traditional sources, the Qur’n’s revelation occurred in bits and pieces over the course of twenty-three years. Many of these fragments explicitly referred to incidents and controversies in Muammad’s life, and, therefore, the lives of those around him, the people for whom the Qur’n calls him ibukum. The Qur’n does not read as Allh’s monologue, but rather as one half of a dialogue. When I read about the Companions, the boundary between their lives and the Qur’n dissolves. “They ask you” (yas’alnaka), says the Qur’n to Muammad, before giving him an answer; this occurs numerous times in the Qur’n, including several instances within a relatively compact sequence in sra 2 on topics such as the new moon (2:189), charity (2:215), the prohibited month (2:217), wine and gambling (2:219), orphans (2:220), and menstruation (2:222).11 As the German physicist Werner Heisenberg had famously remarked, “What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”;12 the speaker in the Qur’n is not simply Allh, but Allh as produced in the Companions’ questions of him. If we read the Qur’n as a twenty-three-year series of responses to the changing lives of its audience, the Companions suddenly appear to have a degree of agency in determining the Qur’n’s content—and even its delivery, as tradition suggests that the revelations briefly ceased due to poor fingernail hygiene among the Companions. The revelations did not include women as addressees until one of Muammad’s wives asked him why, after which the voice of the divine became more inclusive.
The Companions are said to have behaved carefully in Muammad’s presence, fearful that they could end up as the subjects of a verse;13 nonetheless, the Qur’n is filled with their traces. The Qur’n does not usually name them; those for whom the Qur’n called Muammad ibukum are rendered almost invisible as individuals. Names of figures whom later history records as important, such as Ab Bakr or ’Al, are absent from the verses. The Qur’n does not give us the names of Muammad’s parents or wives or biological children. The only people from his lifetime to be mentioned by name in the Qur’n are Zayd, identified in tradition as Muammad’s adopted son Zayd ibn Haritha (33:37), and a figure called Ab Lahab, “Father of Flames” (111:1), presumed by interpretive tradition to have been Muammad’s despised uncle. But the Qur’n does make reference to people who took part in the first Muslim community, such as the mention in 80:1–2 of an unidentified blind man who went to see Muammad. Tradition outside the Qur’n names him as Ibn Umm Maktum, and an incident from his life is now part of the divine revelation.
In one episode, the scribe to whom Muammad was reciting a verse excitedly remarked, “Blessed be Allh, the best of creators.” Muammad then told the scribe that “Blessed be Allh, the best of creators” actually belonged in that verse, at the exact point at which the scribe said it. The scribe’s outburst can be found at the end of 23:14.14 Incorporating stories of the early community into my Qur’n, I lose my sense of the Qur’n as a singular text that preexisted the created universe, awaiting its delivery to one man in installments. Instead, the Qur’n looks like a trace of a specific community’s encounter with divine power—a power whose spontaneous bursts, localized at the site of one man’s body, appeared as an ongoing exchange with that community. Maybe this view compromises the dominant Sunn theological position regarding the Qur’n, namely that it is uncreated and preexisted the world.
In an idealized Salaf method of reading, we would not prioritize our own eyes over those of the Qur’n’s original audience. Instead of attempting to decipher a verse for ourselves, which leaves the Qur’n vulnerable to our prejudices, assumptions, and desires, we instead ask what the Prophet had said to his Companions about that verse, or what the Companions related to the Followers. The Companions do appear in traditional sources as Qur’n interpreters. adth reports portray ‘’isha as an authoritative teacher of the Qur’n who intervened in debates on the text’s meaning.15 Ibn ‘Abbs, the Prophet’s paternal cousin (and ancestor of the ‘Abbsids), is treated as a foundational figure in the field of exegesis, and tradition represents Muammad as praying for Ibn ‘Abbs to comprehend scripture.
According to the memory of later generations, the Companions occasionally disagreed on the meanings of verses. In conflicting opinions as to whether the fifty-third sra discusses a personal, visionary encounter between Muammad and Allh, Ibn ‘Abbs believed that Muammad had in fact seen Allh, while others (most vehemently ‘’isha) argued that no one could see Allh in this life, neither with their physical eyes nor the mystical “eyes of the heart”; they insisted that the vision was of the angel Gabriel. Even if we suspend the question of whether these opinions really belonged to the Companions to whom they are attributed, we face the challenge of the Companions’ personal subjectivities. In the case of tagging the unidentified shadd al-qawwa of Muammad’s vision as either Allh or a mere angel, we should consider that this encounter took place before either ‘’isha or Ibn ‘Abbs were born. They would have learned about Muammad’s experience many years later, after the Muslims’ migration from Mecca to Medina—a time in which Muammad’s primary conversation partners and opponents were no longer polytheists, but Jews and Christians, who would have engaged the narrative from their own theological footings. The Qur’n’s more conservative verses regarding human access to Allh are commonly dated from this period. Is it possible that Muammad’s own understanding of his vision changed with time, and that ‘’isha’s opinion represents Muammad’s later memory? This isn’t necessarily a problem, depending on how you view things like the Qur’n’s self-abrogation. On the other side, perhaps Ibn ‘Abbs’s understanding had come from older Companions who clung to earlier ideas about the vision; does this mean that Muammad had not corrected them, and that they never learned of the new interpretation? Could the report in which Ibn ‘Abbs explained that Muammad had seen Allh with his heart or in a dream signify a reconciliation of conflicting opinions?
The traditional accounts mention the Companions arguing not only about the Qur’n’s meaning, but also its form. In one episode, ‘Umar disagreed with a junior Companion over a sra because they had memorized it at different times. Having memorized the sra first, ‘Umar conceded that his recitation of the sra was less authoritative, since the later recitation must have abrogated the sra as he knew it.16 In stories of the Qur’n’s compilation into what is now its recognizable form, we find Companions arguing with each other over the inclusion of verses and even suggesting that not all of the Qur’n had been preserved.
Amid political and theological strife, the Companions, Followers, Followers of the Followers, and post-Salaf generations worked to stabilize the Qur’n. According to popular Sunn history, the Qur’n was first collected during the caliphate of Ab Bakr. ‘Umar had come to Ab Bakr after numerous Qur’n reciters had been killed in battle and suggested that the Qur’n be compiled for preservation as a textual artifact. Ab Bakr objected: “How can you do something which the Messenger of Allh did not do?” ‘Umar answered, “By Allh, it is a good thing.” Ab Bakr accepted ‘Umar’s position and commanded Zayd ibn Thbit, who had been Muammad’s scribe. Zayd echoed Ab Bakr’s initial concern over departing from Muammad’s example, but Ab Bakr repeated what ‘Umar had said to him: “By Allh, it is a good thing.” What I find startling here is Ab Bakr’s precise order: “Search for the Qur’n and collect/assemble it.” Zayd had to search for something that was out there, beyond even the reach of Ab Bakr, to then gather what was scattered and give form to the formless. It would be unfathomable for many Muslims today to think of the Qur’n in such terms, to imagine the Qur’n as a chaos that must be brought to order by human effort.
In Zayd’s narration of the endeavor, he relates, “So I searched for the Qur’n, and collected it from palm leaves, stones and the breasts of men.” This project resulted in a written copy of the Qur’n, which the Companions called a maaf (reportedly after the Ethiopian word for book), produced not for public use but for archival preservation. Discussing the etymology of the Greek root for archive, Jacques Derrida notes that it was the holders of political power who, as makers of the law, became archons; they protected official documents in their private residences, placing the archive under a kind of “house arrest.”17 As caliph, Ab Bakr retained possession of the new Qur’nic archive. After Ab Bakr’s death, it was kept by his political successor, ‘Umar; with ‘Umar’s death, the archive went into the hands of ‘Umar’s daughter, Hafsa, who was also a widow of the Prophet and regarded as an authoritative scholar of the Qur’n.18 During the third caliphate, the regime of ’Uthmn, a second “official” collection of the Qur’n would be established, this time to achieve standardization of the public Qur’n. ’Uthmn was driven to this project after controversies over proper readings spread among the adherents of conflicting versions (as many as fifteen different collections in the possession of individual Companions and thirteen among the Followers19) and also among troops during distant campaigns. For his codification enterprise, ’Uthmn is said to have borrowed the Ab Bakr archive from Hafsa. However, the ambition was not merely to reproduce Hafsa’s document exactly as it appeared, as ’Uthmn assembled a team of experts to examine and confirm the text. He appointed Zayd ibn Thbit as overseer and also recruited three Meccans to assist the process—one because he was an expert in the Arabic language, the other two because they were from Muammad’s tribe, the Quraysh—and reportedly asked that if the three ever contested Zayd’s opinion regarding a verse, that they should write the verse in the “original” Quraysh dialect.20 In a further innovation, ’Uthmn ordered that copies of the state-supported Qur’n be sent to major cities, and that competing local versions be destroyed. Some of these versions reportedly differed from ’Uthmn’s codex in the inclusion or exclusion of particular verses or entire sras. Similar to the way in which reports of Muammad’s statements would be authenticated, these rival collections of the Qur’n were associated with the prestige of specific Companions. In Kfa, where the Companion Ibn Mas’d’s collection had been established as the official version, there was brief resistance to ’Uthmn’s state codex. What we can gather from the accounts of these variants, explains Estelle Whelan, is that early Muslims were willing to base their arguments against each other “on the premise that the Qur’n had not been given definitive form by the Prophet to whom it had been revealed.”21 There is also a report that after Ab Bakr’s collection was returned to Hafsa, the governor of Medina demanded that she hand it over to him for destruction; even if her archive had provided the foundation for ’Uthmn’s project, it was not equal to the finished, official codex, and the governor feared that it would undermine the new caliphal archive. Hafsa refused; but after her death, the governor seized her collection and ordered that the pages be torn up.22 This could illustrate a point about the ironies of preserving tradition: To safeguard the Qur’n’s integrity and unity, the oldest complete and “official” copy of the Qur’n had to be destroyed.
What has been called the Qur’n’s “still-fluid pre-canonical text”23 did not instantly become solid with ’Uthmn’s codex, which remained capable of variation. It appears that the copies that ’Uthmn sent to cities such as Mecca, Damascus, Bara, and Kfa did not match each other perfectly, perhaps including copyists’ mistakes. ’Uthmn is reported to have allowed the imprecise copies, assuming that any mistakes would be corrected by knowledgeable Arabs.24 On top of these challenges, there was the problem of instability in Arabic writing. At the time, the Arabic script was not fully developed, lacking vowel marks or dots. The government’s Qur’n, therefore, provided only a bare consonantal skeleton, which allowed for multiple vocalizations and changes in meaning. Without voweling, the word mlk in the first sra could undergo a subtle shift in interpretation, recited as either malik (“king”) or mlik (“owner”). Without dots to properly distinguish the letters, the word fl (“elephant”) could be read in numerous ways, such as ql (“it is said”), qatala (“he killed”), or qabala (“he kissed”). While the variations themselves did not produce major controversies over meaning—at no point, for example, were there debates over 105:1’s mention of an elephant—the mere fact of difference nonetheless enabled competing schools to discredit each other through the charge of faulty readings.25 Roughly fifty years after the establishment of the ’Uthmnic codex, the Qur’n’s text would be further codified under the Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-ajjj ibn Ysuf al-Thaqaf (d. 713). Two centuries later, seven vocalizations of the Qur’n’s consonants would be established as acceptable, based on transmissions that traced back to seven well-known reciters from the cities that had received ’Uthmn’s codex. The era in which the Qur’n’s vowels and dots were secured was one in which numerous fields of knowledge underwent a “shift towards the consolidation, standardisation and canonisation of concepts and doctrines.”26
Prior to the advancements in Arabic writing, the textual copy (muaf) of the Qur’n would not have been useful as a source of information. It functioned more as a tool for those who already knew the words to refresh their memorization or teach others, or, as in the case of a caliphal codex, to establish the proper contents and their organization. With the orthographic reforms and fixing of the Qur’n’s vocalization, however, the revelation could speak to new audiences—and these audiences could assert their right to understand the material. The revealed text, which had previously been the territory of oral reciters (qurr’) who traced their knowledge to the Prophet, became accessible to a developing field of professional grammarians (nawiyyn). Efforts to understand the Qur’n encouraged the formation of grammatical schools, which in turn transformed the study of the Qur’n. The grammarians, boasting superior mastery of the Arabic language, competed with the reciters as privileged custodians of the revelation. Their battle for authority would be decided in part by the introduction of paper, which replaced inferior papyrus and amplified the presence of book media in Muslim debates; when the Qur’n became a book to be comprehended through the knowledge of other books and fields of study, the reciters lost.27 Though philologically centered reading had first emerged as a threat to what had been the traditional mode of authority, it became established as a “traditional” method in its own right, since the knowledge of words’ precise meanings promised to push out the reader’s personal subjectivity and restrain oneself within the words. For those who placed confidence in the exact wording of the Qur’n as the means of establishing and regulating truth, the systematic study of Arabic became a prerequisite to authority.
The tradition-innovation binary loses more power here. To preserve tradition means first deciding what counts as tradition and therefore requires the work of preservation, then clarifying what had been left vague or open to dispute, sealing closed any cracks and fissures, adapting to new technologies and fields of knowledge, and redrawing boundaries. To properly shelter the tradition requires more stability than the tradition had ever secured on its own. The refined tradition ends up more guarded from misreadings, and thus narrower in its possibilities, than it could have been without these innovative interventions. After such a process, can it be the same tradition that it had been before getting marked as “tradition”? Even if every letter was preserved exactly as the first Companions received it from Muammad, the process by which Muslims protected the Qur’n from change inevitably changed the Qur’n. The revelation bound in book form strikes me as a memorial to the lost.
Popular Muslim history suggests that Muammad was illiterate, an intellectual virgin. His lack of education presents the textual Qur’n as a miracle, like Mary becoming pregnant without a man’s intervention. Muammad was all shaman, no scientist, no critical theorist. Revelation came to him like the ringing of a bell and made him sweat even in the cold, but he left us with these words that we pick over and throw at each other in rational debates.
Muhammad said that scholars were heirs to the prophets; at least the scholars tell us so. Funny how that works.
For scholars to actualize the role that Muammad had reportedly assigned them, Muammad must be absent; they can’t inherit from a living prophet who still speaks. I don’t know exactly what it meant to be a “scholar” in his time, but it’s only after the death of Muammad, and with his death the guarantee of prophethood’s closure, that the Qur’n can become an intellectual project, the domain of scholars. If theology is what happens when the intellect negotiates with a scripture, theologians can say nothing to prophets. Theology might claim submission to text but really conquers, keeping the words intact but still assuming control over them. The Qur’n was Allh giving humanity his Qul, the command, “Say”—an imperative that occurs some three hundred times in the text. Every interpreter reverses the Qur’n’s flow of power, telling Allh not what to say, but rather what to mean when he speaks. This cannot be helped by calling your reading “literal.” Reading is writing, every time.
Even as the Qur’n successfully repeats itself, speaking to times and places beyond its first audience, a text’s repeatability in part depends on the potential for its old words to produce new results. A verse remains powerful not because it imposes its meaning on the future, but because it accommodates the future’s needs: The verse is not bound to its author or its first audience. While the Qur’n’s references point to what’s outside itself, the outside also pours in. Ideas that did not exist for the earliest Muslim community sneak into the Qur’n, find homes for themselves in the words, and give the appearance of having always been there. One such idea might have been the notion of human souls. Does the Qur’n espouse belief in a soul that exists independently of our bodies? We tend to assume that it does, since the Qur’n speaks of resurrection and we have been trained to think about resurrection in terms of souls. The text of the Qur’n, however, consistently speaks of the afterlife in terms of Allh’s power to reassemble and revive the material body, even after the body has turned into dust; it does not explicitly argue that an immaterial aspect of every person will outlast her physical matter. The word that we now take for granted as equivalent to “soul,” nafs, is used in numerous ways in the Qur’n, typically in relation to selfhood—not only Allh, but even false idols are referred to as having nafs—but never in a sense that undoubtedly produces a distinction between corporeal substance and abstract spirit. Later understandings of nafs reflect the conversation between Muslim intellectuals and Greek philosophical tradition, as found in al-Ghazl, who, despite his defense of bodily resurrection, read the Qur’n while upholding an Aristotelian idea of the soul that al-Rz rejected.28
In his translation of the Qur’n, British convert scholar Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936) explained the Qur’n’s first sra in his commentary as “the Lord’s Prayer of the Muslims.”29 It may be unsophisticated to think of the Qur’n as the “Muslim Bible,” but sometimes that’s what it becomes: As James W. Morris explains, “virtually all the extant English Qur’n translations are still profoundly rooted . . . in a semantic universe of allusions and parallels to the language and symbolism of Bible translations.”30 The first translation of the Qur’n that I read had come from Yusuf Ali (1872–1953), a colonial Indian Muslim living in London. The other major English translation from colonial India was that of Ahmadiyya scholar Maulana Muhammad Ali (1874–1951). Both translators sought to present the Qur’n within the genre of sacred literature as readers of English could recognize it: In their hands, Allh’s Arabic speech becomes King James English, peppered with thou and thy to decorate itself with an Anglo-biblical style. The divine He is capitalized to follow norms of Victorian-era English literature, the Qur’n’s Arabic names for Israelite prophets are Anglicized (‘s becomes Jesus, Ms becomes Moses), and the translators’ extensive notes often explain the Qur’n through references to the Bible or Christian tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, the Nation of Islam was purchasing these Qur’n translations in bulk from a Pakistani importer in New Jersey: South Asian Muslims’ experience of an English-speaking, Protestant colonial power thus produced the Qur’n that could resonate with an African American Muslim community led by the son of a Baptist preacher. In his commentary on the Qur’n, Elijah Muhammad also interpreted the subject headings that appeared in Maulana Muhammad Ali’s translation, as though he believed that these subject headings were part of the divinely revealed Arabic text.31 Even the “Qur’n” as Elijah conceptualized it reflects an act of translation. Perceiving the Qur’n through a Protestant background that taught him what scriptures were and how they worked, he expressed little interest in adth collections or Muslim interpretive traditions as conduits through which the Qur’n must be read. A “Muslim Bible” that he could read for himself, essentially a superior version of the Bible that he already knew, was exactly what he sought and found. When presented in translation to a mostly non-Muslim society, the Qur’n might inspire some readers to convert, but the Qur’n undergoes a conversion of its own. Perhaps this is what it means for religious scholars in sixteenth-century South Asia to have opposed Bengali translation of the Qur’n, on the grounds that such a project would constitute the “Hinduization of Islam.”32
Like soul or star, words like belief, prophet, and piety come loaded with culturally specific baggage: They cannot help but bring new ideas or sensibilities to the original terms imn, nab, and taqwa. A prime example would be wal, a term of special significance in f traditions to refer to the “friends” of God. When Orientalist scholars rewrote wal with the English word saint, and Muslim intellectuals in turn adopted this translation, a historical tension within Muslim traditions now related to a point of controversy between Protestants and Catholics. Muslim thinkers concerned with the revival of original Islam and/or proving Islam’s rationality, operating within the global hegemony of Protestant empires, expressed anti-f prejudice with the vocabulary of Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice.
This is why I do not consistently translate the Arabic Allh into the English God. When I converted, I changed my own name to its Arabic version (Mik’l) and did the same to God, attempting to reinvent both of us in a language that I did not speak. I needed a theatrically alterior word like Allh to erase my previous script with God (in the constraints of my own lived experience, it was irrelevant that Arabic-speaking Christians also call upon God as Allh). Even if God and Allh are perfectly interchangeable, my decision to translate or not translate the name adds significations to both terms, because God’s Arabic name is so widely referenced in English that it functions as an English word. English-speaking non-Muslims refer to “Allh” in debates over Islam’s perceived foreignness to America and incompatibility with Jews and Christians, alleging that Allh cannot be the god of the Bible; these people obviously haven’t read the New Testament in Arabic. While the appearance of Allh in an Arabic text can refer to the god of Muslims, Christians, Jews, or any monotheist, uses of the word in English conversation exclusively point to the religion of Muslims: The word’s meaning becomes “God as conceptualized by Muslims.” Likewise, if I am asked to imagine Jesus or ‘s, two different characters appear, though these names refer to the same prophet.
Even if a word in one language can be exactly matched by a word in another, translation still makes an effect. Look at this extraction from 5:3, which is widely regarded as the final verse of the Qur’n to have been revealed:
Today I have perfected your religion for you, completed my favor upon you, and have named for you Islam as a religion.
This is a popular translation, but we could raise some questions. First, “religion” as a category isn’t any more stable or consistent than things like “race,” “gender,” “nation,” or “science”—or, for that matter, the “sun” or “moon” as produced in our culturally specific knowledges—and so we shouldn’t assume that the word expresses a universal concept that exists with the same meanings throughout all of history. The modern sense of religion as a belief system or closed set of doctrines does not exist in the Qur’n, which speaks only of communities: The Qur’n discusses “Christians” and their beliefs but has no word for Christianity. In the Qur’n’s typology of communities, there are people who have scriptures from the Creator, and those who don’t; there are communities that follow their prophets, and others that deviate from what they were given; but there is not a multiplicity of “religions.” When translators decide that 5:3’s mention of dn (which translators read elsewhere in the Qur’n as “judgment” or “duty”) signifies “religion,” they force their own concepts onto the seventh century.
Second, to leave islm untranslated only performs an alternative translation: It turns the Arabic islm into Islam, an English word found in English dictionaries. The Arabic verbal noun islm (signifying “submission” or “surrender”) appears only eight times in the Qur’n and never clearly as a proper name; after all, if there are no proper names for Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism in the Qur’n, the Qur’n doesn’t have to name its own system. Within the Qur’n and even among the works of classical theologians such as al-Ghazl, as scholar Carl Ernst points out, islm is less prominent as an identity marker than imn (“faith” or “belief”) and the holder of privileged identity is less often called a muslim (“submitter”) than mu’min (“believer”).33 In the modern era of named religions, however, islm is not only left untranslated in English Qur’ns, but finds itself capitalized as a proper name, Islam, to work within the Protestantized category of “religion” that has just been imposed upon the verse. We make the Qur’n report our own world back to us: The Qur’n now tells us that we have a perfect religion and that our perfect religion has a name. We could read the proclamation another way and potentially alter the verse’s consequences:
Today I have perfected your judgment for you, completed my favor upon you, and have named for you surrender as a duty.
Besides the projection of new meanings onto the words, translation also erases meanings: When we decide upon a meaning, we suppress the alternatives. Qur’nic translation threatens to conflate the translator’s mind with the mind of the Qur’n’s author. We tend to make a big deal of the claim that not so much as a single letter has been added to the Qur’n or removed from it since the time of Muammad, but when I think about what we actually do when we read—let alone translate—I find myself asking a “So, what?” that cannot be answered.
The original meaning isn’t always the most useful. Today, the Qur’n’s 109th sra is popularly interpreted as a statement of interfaith tolerance through its verses that have been translated thus: “Nor will I be a worshiper of what you worship, nor will you be worshipers of what I worship; for you is your religion and for me is a religion.” But if your method of interpretation places a premium on historical context (and you believe that we have access to this context), reading the sra as a message that came first to specific people at a specific moment in their lives, it becomes more difficult to project our modern values onto the words. Mecca’s polytheists had reportedly offered a wager to Muammad: that Muammad worship their gods for one year, after which the polytheists would devote one year to worship of Allh alone, and whoever ended up better off would adopt the other side’s mode of worship permanently. Sra 109 came as a rejection of this proposal, making its own wager: Muammad will never leave his superior, true dn, and this particular group of unbelievers will never abandon their inferior, false dn. Premodern commentators who situated the sra in its historical setting did not see the verses as suggesting that all “religions” were equal roads to the same truth, contrary to the hopes of modern readers with interest in interfaith dialogue. Rather, it was a prediction that came true, as the unbelievers to whom it referred never accepted Muammad’s prophethood. If we choose to uphold the occasion of the sra’s revelation and its original audience as the keys to its message, we lose our reading of the 109th sra as a statement of liberal religious pluralism, and what strikes us as the clear “literal” meaning is complicated by history.34
Verse 20:102 describes the criminals who will be gathered on the Day as “blue-eyed.” In Mediterranean antiquity’s medical theories of the body, external bodily traits were regarded as clues to a person’s inner character, and even the great Imm Shfi’ followed Hellenic physiognomy in his confidence that people with blue eyes were idiots.35 For their racialized understandings of the Qur’n, however, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan are popularly imagined as heretical deviants whose theodicy of blue-eyed “white devils” distorts the Qur’n’s true message of racial egalitarianism. The irony is that in the case of 20:102, these “heretics” find themselves closer to a plain-sense reading, which pits them against “orthodox” scholars who would rather explain the verse away. When it comes to 20:102, Nation of Islam exegetes appear to be the only scriptural literalists in town.
The Qur’n features prominently in popular “Islam was the world’s first feminism” narratives: As the pamphlets tell us, people in pre-Islamic Mecca used to bury newborn girls alive, and the Qur’n emphatically condemns this practice (16:58–59, 81:8–90). Numerous Muslim commentators have used these verses as evidence that the Qur’n’s divine author sought to advance the status of females. At no point, however, does the Qur’n clearly link its condemnation of female infanticide to a critique of misogyny or affirmation of gender equality. While noting that parents are often disappointed at the birth of a girl and joyous for a boy, the Qur’n does not challenge this attitude except to say that murdering your daughter is the wrong choice. Rather than express a concern with sexism, the Qur’n associates the killing of newborn babies with idolatry and the fear of poverty. If that’s feminist, then the Christian Right’s antiabortion stance is feminist. Moreover, the Qur’
