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THE
KORAN
Sachiko
Murata & William C. Chittick Islam
today is the religion of about one billion people. It is far from correct to
think that all Muslims are familiar with the story of how their religion became
established. History as such has never held much interest for most Muslims. What
is important about historical events is simply that God works through them. The
significant events of the past are those that have a direct impact on people's
present situation and their situation in the next world. From this point of
view, the one event of overwhelming significance is God's revelation of the
Koran. The actual historical and social circumstances in which it was revealed
relate to an extremely specialized field of learning that few scholars ever
bothered with. The fact that Western historians have devoted a great deal of
attention to this issue says something about modern perceptions of what is real
and important, but it tells us nothing about Muslim perceptions of the Koran's
significance. Most
of this book will be dedicated to bringing out some of the more obvious
implications of the Koran's teachings, including what the Koran has to say about
itself. At this point, however, it may be useful to say something about the form
of the Koran, since most of our readers have probably never seen the book
itself, though some may have seen a translation. Notice
that we make a distinction between the Koran and a translation of the Koran.
This is normal procedure in the Muslim view of things, in marked contrast with
the Christian view, according to which the Bible is Bible, no matter what
language it may be written in. For Muslims, the divine Word assumed a specific,
Arabic form, and that form is as essential as the meaning that the words convey.
Hence only the Arabic Koran is the Koran, and translations are simply
interpretations. Translations into the local language of the Islamic world,
particularly Persian, were made at a very early date. However, these were not
independent books but rather interlinear commentaries on the meaning of the text
and aids to understanding. The
Arabic form of the Koran is in many ways more important than the text's meaning.
After all, Muslims have disagreed over the exact interpretation of Koranic
verses as much as followers of other religions have disagreed over their own
scriptures. One of the sources of the richness of Islamic intellectual history
is the variety of interpretations provided for the same verses. Muslim thinks
often quote the Prophet to the effect that every verse of the Koran has seven
meanings, beginning with the literal sense, and as for the seventh and deepest
meaning, God alone knows that. (The Prophet's point is obvious to anyone who has
studied the text carefully.) The language of the Koran is synthetic and
imaginistic - each word has a richness having to do with the special genius of
the Arabic language. People naturally understand different meanings from the
same verse. The
richness of Koranic language and its receptivity toward different interpretation
help explain how this single book could have given shape to one of the world's
great civilizations. If everyone had understood exactly the same thing from the
text, the religion would never have spread as widely as it has. The Book had to
address the simple and the sophisticated, the shepherd and the philosopher, the
scientist and the artist. The
Koran says that God never sends a message except in the language of the people
to whom it is addressed: Revelation conforms to the needs of its recipients. The
Koran also tells us that Muhammad was sent to all the world's inhabitants. In
order to present a message understandable to everyone in the world, the Koran
had to speak a language that everyone could understand. And Islam did in fact
spread very quickly to most of the civilizations of the world, from China and
South-east Asia to Africa and Europe. These people spoke a great diversity of
languages - and we mean not only languages of the tongue, but also languages of
the heart and mind. The Koran has been able to speak to all of them because of
the peculiarities of its own mode of discourse. Far
from being a hindrance to the spread of Islam, as some have imagined, the Arabic
language has been an aid. Although the form of the text was fixed, the meaning
was left with fluidity and adaptability. People who did not know Arabic were
forced to learn the Arabic text and then understand it in terms of their own
cultural and linguistic heritage. But no one's interpretation could be final.
The next generation could not depend exclusively upon the previous generation's
translation and commentary any more than it could ignore the understanding of
the text established by the tradition. Each Muslim needs to establish his or her
own connection with the scripture. All serious Muslims were forced to enter into
this Arabic universe of discourse - a universe, indeed, which they considered
divine. If,
on the one hand, the Arabic Koran encouraged diversity of understanding, on the
other, it encouraged unity of form. All Muslims recited the same scripture in
the same language. They recite their daily-required prayers more or less
identically. Indeed, given the basic importance of God's revealed Word,
recitation is the major way of participating in the Word. Understanding is
secondary, because no one can fathom the meaning of God's Word completely. The
most important task is to receive and preserve the divine Word. Its Arabic form
is all-important. What one does with the form that one receives follows after
receiving it. A
translation of the Koran is not the Koran. but an interpretation of its meaning.
The Koran has been translated dozens of times into English. Each translation
represents one person's understanding of the text, each is significantly
different from the others, and none is the Koran itself. There is but one Word,
but there are as many interpretations of that Word as there are
readers… This
is not to say that Islam is a cacophony of divergent interpretations - far from
it. By and large there is much less diversity of opinions on the fundamentals of
faith and practice than, for example, in Christianity. Those who try their hand
at interpretation have to undergo a great deal of training to enter into the
Koran's world of discourse. Moreover, this training is accompanied by the
embodiment of the Koran through recitation and ritual. The Koran possesses an
obvious power to transform those who try to approach it on its own terms. This
is precisely what Islam is all about - submission to the will of God as revealed
in the Koran - but this is not simply a voluntary submission. The Koran
establishes an existential submission in people so that they come to express its
fundamental message through their mode of being, no matter how "original" their
interpretations may be. Of
course, we are speaking of Koranic interpretation in the context of Islamic
faith and practice. Many Westerners who have not been sympathetic toward Islam
have offered their interpretations of the Koranic text. There is no reason to
suppose that such interpretations will help non-Muslims understand the text that
reveals itself to Muslims. The
Arabic book that goes by the name Koran is about as long as the New Testament.
In most editions it is between 200 and 400 pagers in length. In contrast to the
Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Koran issued from the mouth of a single
person, who recited what he heard from the angel Gabriel. Both the Jewish and
the Christian scriptures are collections of many books that were written down by
a large number of human beings, and opinions differ as to their status as
revelation. Even if we say that the books of the Bible were all revealed, they
were revealed to different people who did not live at the same time or in the
same place. The
Koran is divided into chapters of unequal length, each of which is called a
sura, a word that means literally "a fence, enclosure, or any part of a
structure." The shortest of the suras has ten words, and the longest sura, which
is placed second in the text, has 6,100 words. The first sura, the Fatihah ("The
Opening"), is relatively short (twenty-five words). From the second sura onward,
the suras gradually decrease in length, although is not a hard and fast rule.
The last sixty suras take up about as much space as the second. The
Suras are divided into short passages, each of which is called an aya. Some of
the longer ayas are much longer than the shortest suras. The word aya is often
translated as "verse," but literally it means "sign." This is an extremely
significant word, and we will discuss it in some detail. The
content of the Koran is reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible and the New
Testament. The Koran tells stories about many of the same persons and draws
conclusions for its listeners' edification. The Koran calls the great human
exemplars of the past prophets and mentions as the most important of these Adam,
Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Moses is mentioned by name more than any other
person, followed by Pharaoh, his great enemy, who is the Koranic archetype of
human evil. The
Koran elaborates on the ways in which the followers of the prophets,
specifically the Jews and the Christians, have or have not lived up to the
prophetic messages. It issues instructions on how to live a life pleasing to
God. It tells people that they should pray, fast, and take care of the needy. It
goes into great detail concerning human interrelationships - such as laws of
inheritance and marriage - in a manner reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible
but foreign to the New Testament. It tells people that they should observe God's
instructions purely for God's sake, not for any worldly aims. It warns those who
deny God's message that they will be thrown into the fire of hell, and it
promises those who accept the messages that they will be given the bliss of
paradise. Much more than the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran talks specifically
about God. No matter what the topic may be, it finds occasion to refer the
discussion back to God. if only by the device of attaching clauses mentioning
God by one or more of his names, such as "And God is the Mighty, the
Knowing." For
Westerners, the Koran is an extremely difficult text to appreciate, especially
in translation. Even for those who have spent enough years studying the Arabic
language to read the original, the Koran may appear as disorderly, inaccurate,
and illogical. However, there is enough evidence provided by Islamic
civilization itself, and by the great philosophers, theologians, and poets who
have commented on the text, to be sure that the problem lies on the side of the
reader, not the book. The text is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary ever
put down on paper. Precisely because it is extraordinary, it does not follow
people's expectations as to what a book should be. At
the height of the imperialist era, when social Darwinism had convinced a large
number of Westerners that they were situated at the peak of human perfection,
many scholars looked upon Muslims with disdain for thinking theta the Koran was
worthy of respect. From that high point of human progress, the Koran appeared as
a badly written mishmash of old sayings and superstitions. Most
Western scholarship of a more recent vintage has dropped the assumption of
cultural superiority and looked at the Koran as a book that has its own unique
genius. Positive evaluations are much easier to find that they were fifty years
ago. Nevertheless, major barriers remain that prevent an appreciation of the
Koran by non-Muslims or by those who do not have a thorough training in the
Arabic language and the Islamic sciences. Even such training does not guarantee
access to the book. Many
Muslims, especially those who are native Arabic speakers, feel a proprietary
relationship to the Koran. However, it is not uncommon to meet people who know a
great deal of the text by heart but have not the slightest understanding of the
worldview that permeates it. This does not necessarily hinder them from
absorbing the Koran's transforming influence. But does meant that they are
unable to express the Koran's meaning in a way that harmonizes with their own
tradition. The
nature of the Koranic worldview presents a fundamental barrier to understanding
the book. It is true that the Koran's view of things has a deep kinship with
both the Jewish and Christian worldviews, but most people in the modern world
have little understanding of those worldviews either. Simply attending
synagogue, church, or mosque does not mean that one sees things any differently
from contemporary atheists. Our culture's dominant ways of thing are taught to
us not in our place of worship, but in our media and educational institutions.
We may like to thing that our education is scientific and unbiased, but this is
a highly biased judgement, as many contemporary tinkers and social critics have
told us. (2) As
a rule, it seems, when people with no grounding in the Islamic worldview pick up
a translation of the Koran, they have their prejudices confirmed, whatever these
may be. No real entrance into the Koranic view of things is possible without
some idea of the type of thinking that infuses the text. And that thinking is
foreign to the way that we are taught to think in our own culture and in modern
education in general. We
do not mean to suggest that people with a modern mindset - which includes
practically all English-speaking or modern educated Muslims - will not be able
to understand anything of the Koran, or that they should not bother reading the
available translations, First of all, the very fact that the Koran has been
translated means that the translator has accomplished the task of brining it
into the range of modern way of thinking - and, of course, by that very fact may
have severely distorted the meaning. In any case, everyone curious about Islam
who cannot read Arabic should certainly read the book in translation. As a rule,
it is much more useful to open it at random and read a few pages than to try to
go through it systematically. The
Koranic worldview is closely tied to the Arabic language, which, like Hebrew and
Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus), belongs to the Semitic family. The
internal logic of Semitic languages is very different from that of Indo-European
languages such as English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian. To begin with, each
word derives from a root that is typically made up of three letters. From the
three-letter root, many hundreds of derived forms can be constructed, though
usually only a few score of these are actually used. We will often discuss
Arabic words in explaining the meaning of concepts. Without such discussion it
would be impossible to suggest the richness of the associated meanings, the
difficulty of translating words into English, and the interrelationships among
Arabic words that are obvious in the original. ·
(1)
Vision of Islam (Introduction - pp. XIV - XIX) by Sachiko Murata and William C.
Chittick - Paragon House, New York (U.S.A.), 1994 - ISBN 1-55778-516-3
(pbk) (2)
Those interested in learning more about some of the criticisms we have in mind
might begin by looking at the books cited by Lawrence E. Sullivan in his
masterly study, Ic\nchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American
Religions (New York, Macmillan, 1988), pp.884-85. What he says in the passage
leading upto the suggested reading applies also to Western perceptions of Islam:
"One of the great disservices to our understanding of South American religions
(read: Islam) has been the perception of tribal people (read: Muslims) as
slavishly dedicated to an unchanging order revealed in the images of myth and
handed down unquestioned and unmodified from one generation to the
next. This attitude accompanies the evaluation of 'myth' as a banal and inane narrative. Tribal peoples (representing 'archaic' modes of thought) childishly cling to their myths. infantile fantasies, whereas mature contemporaries jettison myths with the passage of 'historical times' and the 'entrance' into 'modernity'. It would be fascinating to study these and other justifications proffered for avoiding a serious encounter with the reality of myth [read: Islamic thought] and symbolic acts…. This is not the place to carry out a history of the 'modern' ideas of myth and religion. It is enough to suggest that the Western cultural imagination turned away when it encountered the stunning variety of cultural worlds that appeared for the first time in the Age of Discovery. Doubtless this inward turn sparked the appearance of all sorts of imaginary realities. The Enlightenment, the withdrawal of Western thinkers from the whirling world of cultural values into an utterly imaginary world of 'objective' forms of knowledge, and its intellectual follow-up coined new symbolic currency. These terms brought new meanings and self-definition to Western culture: 'consciousness/unconsciousness,' 'primitive/civilized,' 'ethics/mores,' 'law/custom,' 'critical or reflective thought/action,'"
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Say: "Truly, my worship and my sacrifice and my living and my dying are for Allah, Lord of the Worlds. He has no partner. This am I commanded, and I am first of those who surrender to Him."[The Holy Qur'an, Surah An'Am, Chapter 6 Verses 162 and 163] |