My Perspective on Islam Thank you, AlephNull, for your comment #10 of August 8 to my Chowk piece. I`m sorry for this late reply. In reply to the very valid point made by you, all I can do is to reproduce a couple of paras I had written in one of my prefatory pieces for my proposed book. Here it is:

[I ignore for the purpose of this presentation the view of a recent group of Western scholars -Patircia Crone, Michael Cook, John Wansbrough et al - who have put forward an interesting revisionist theory about the birth of the Quran. Based on their research, they maintain that the Quranic verses were put together from oral stories retold a century or two after the Prophet’s death when Arab civilization was at its imperial peak and the Arabs wished to give themselves an identity distinct from that of the culturally superior peoples they ruled over in neighbouring Byzantium and Iran.

[I also overlook in this presentation the ongoing exchanges between Christian and Islamic evangelical groups on such Internet websites as “answering-Islam” and “answering-Chritianity” on the weight to be attached to various claims regarding the Quran on the basis of traditional Muslim sources.

[Although my book does take a passing look at some of these issues, it is based for the most part on the way the Muslims themselves view their history, founded as this necessarily is on traditional sources. My principal concern is with Muslim beliefs and practices and not “what actually happened in history” which, here as elsewhere, is itself a moot issue. For me, the problem of Islam is how its followers perceive their faith not Islam per se]. Rasheed Talib.

My Perspective on Islam Facts about the Quran not often emphasized

#5: Reply to Dost Mitter: You are right, the masses will more readily dig into the Ulema version of the Quran than mine. But there’s no harm in bringing out facts not often emphasized by the religious doctors of the faith (one day, hopefully, they - the masses as well as the ulema - may be willing to face the facts). Another Section of my book is headed ``Facts about the Quran seldom emphasized``. If this is not too long as an interact to your comments, perhaps the editors will let me run it here. They may of course edit it down by omitting some of the quotes I have used. Here goes:

Few Muslim scholars ask a question that needs to be asked about the Quran as we know it today. When exactly, according to Islam’s own Traditionists, did the Quran come into existence as the Holy Book in the form we hold in our hands today? Mainstream sects of Islam all subscribe to the belief that the Prophet received the revelations at various stages of his prohethood, as and when he needed God’s guidance.

Traditionists of the Sunni sect agree that the verses constituting the Quran - a collection of orally conveyed revelations - was first collated as a volume some time between two years and two decades after the Prophet’s death (632 CE). Followers of the minority Shia sect disagree with this version. According to their Traditionists, the Quran in its entirety, as a whole, was handed over to Muhammad a little before his death by his cousin and son-in-law, Ali bin Abu Talib. The Shiites, however, constitute a small minority while the Sunnis make up something like 85-90 percent of world Islam.

That the Quran is a post-Prophet development is now a well established fact, supported by a great deal of non-partisan evidence. It is supported, for one thing, by simple reasoning. The Prophet received his revelations between 610 and 632, with the last of them being delivered to him, it is believed, a week or so before he died. The revelations could therefore hardly have been assembled, compiled and collated into a volume while he was living.

As though, this is not enough, clinching evidence of their ‘gradual evolution’ is provided by the Quran itself. Verse 32 chapter 25, in Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation, reads:

Those who reject Faith say: Why is not the Quran revealed to him all at once? It was revealed thus that We may strengthen thy heart thereby. And We have revealed it to thee in slow, well-arranged stages, gradually.

Many are the Traditions that may be cited to show how exactly the revelations came to be compiled. I reproduce the most significant of these in paraphrase since most do not lend themselves easily for verbatim quotation.

One such Tradition goes as follows. During his lifetime – narrates an early commentator, Jalaluddin Suyuti (d. ) - the Arabic term, Quran, used to denote any string of verses recited as part of the Islamic prayer. The name, Quran - which means a recitation or discourse – to describe the compiled form of the verses appears to have acquired currency after Muhammad’s death.

Another authentic Tradition reinforces this view. It narrates how the collected verses first came to be named. The first caliph, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, called upon the Prophet’s close companions after his death to suggest a suitable title for the volume. Some suggested the name, Sifu; others, Mushaf. The group eventually agreed upon the name, al-Quran.

A detailed account about how the revelations were collected and issued as a volume affirms that the Prophet’s two immediate successors - the caliphs Abu Bakr (ruled 632-634) and Umar bin Khattab (r. 634-644) - commissioned his close companions and scribes to collect the revelations from diverse sources: they were found lying in a heap with one of his wives, Hafsa, or were tucked away in the memory of his companions who, gifted with the facility of total recall, are said to have learnt them by heart as they fell from the Prophet’s lips.

But the two caliphs were only partially successful. The burden of completing the work and circulating it in an authoritative edition fell upon the third caliph, Uthman bin Affan (r. 644-656). He accomplished the task and dispatched copies of what is now known as the Uthmanic rescension (Mushaf Uthman) to the far-flung regions of the then Islamic world, ordering all other dialectal variants to be burnt.

In light of all noted above, the contrary version subscribed to by the Shiites lacks credibility. Their belief that Ali handed over the Quran in its entirety to Muhammad would seem to be motivated by their well-known political animosity towards anything to do with the first three caliphs. According to the Shiites, all three of them were usurpers: by rights Ali, the fourth caliph, should have succeeded the Prophet as his only surving blood kinsman.

It is also useful to recall here that the revelations did not come down ‘from on high’ in a vacuum: they were revealed to Muhammad on every occasion that his circumstance demanded.

A close study of the Quran’s voluminous text shows that each verse or cluster of verses, besides having an immediate scriptural context, has also a historical context. Since the time that Quranic studies grew into a serious discipline, scholars - Muslim and Western - have tried to trace and document what is traditionally termed ‘the occasions of revelations’ or, as we would say today, their contextual setting. But there is as yet little scholarly consensus on the results of these exercises.

The Quran is unique but peculiar scripture

It is appropriate next to examine some rather unusual features of the Quran – unusual because they are not found in other monotheistic scriptures - most of which got attached to it in its progress through history.

First and foremost, the Quran is a unique scripture: the Prophet’s revelations have been preserved with their textual integrity intact over the centuries. This is more than can be claimed of any similar scripture. As harsh a critic of Islam as the Prophet’s biographer, Sir William Muir, writing in the 18th century under the strong influence of Christian evangelism, observed that “there is probably in the world no other which has remained twelve centuries with so pure a text”.

But this uniqueness is at least partly responsible for some of the peculiarities that now characterize it. The scribes, entrusted with the task of collecting the revelations - doubtless moved by the belief that they were reproducing God’s own words – took them down in an ‘as-is’ and unedited manner which has meant that the Quran lacks an overall structure and conceptual design.

This is the first of the Quran’s ‘peculiar’ features. Two other such features came to be associated with it in the course of its belated and hurried compilation. They are set out below under a) and b) below:

a) The arrangement of verses is without reference to context or chronology:

Under caliph Uthman’s hastily improvized orders, the Prophet’s scribes stitched the verses together with neither chronology nor context in mind but rather by arbitrarily putting the longer chapters at the beginning and the shorter ones at the end. This again has contributed to the difficulty we experience in interpreting it. One possible explanation for this arrangement may well be that the Quran was originally conceived as a book of prayers and devotions whose shorter chapters at the end of the volume could then more easily be memorized for recitation purposes.

The Canadian scholar, Andrew Rippin, sums up this feature in his little book, The Muslims, thus:

How did the Quran come to look the way it does, with the subject matter within individual chapters jumping from one topic to the next, with duplications and apparent inconsistencies in grammar, law and theology abounding? To the source critic, the work displays all the tendencies of rushed editing with only the most superficial concern for the content, the editors/compilers apparently engaged in establishing a fixed text of scripture.

Westerners, generally speaking, find the unstructured nature of the text to be in turn fascinating and exasperating. The British journalist, Malise Ruthven, author of a sympathetic introductory book, Islam in the World, belongs to the former category. The Quran for him consists of stories of the earlier prophets and punishment stories about those who failed to heed them mixed with ‘psalm-like lyrical passages’ celebrating the manifestation of God’s glory and ‘Leviticus-like legal prescriptions’. He illustrates the point by reproducing a passage from the Sura of Light which he declares to be “among the most celebrated passages in all mystical literature”:

God is the Light of the Heavens and Earth, a Light that sits in a niche containing a lamp, the lamp enclosed in glass, the glass like a radiant star; a lamp lit from a blessed tree, an olive tree neither of the east or west, the oil whereof so bright that it shines forth even though no fire has touched it. Light upon Light. (Quran 24: ).

But, given its ill-ordered arrangement, some of the most eloquent verses are found juxtaposed with its most prosaic. For instance, the above passage, undoubtedly one of great mystic beauty, is preceded by verses that prescribe punishment for the offence of adultery (100 lashes) and, a verse or two later, for that of slander (80 lashes). Some verses in the same chapter urge upon women not to ‘swing their legs while walking so as not to draw attention to their hidden charms’.

Never short of empathy for his subject, Ruthven is able to find a plausible justification for this “curious amalgam”:

This deliberate mixing of the sublime and the mundane, which Westeners might see as evidence of a ‘consistent lack of logical structure’, has in the didactic and liturgical context a powerful function. For, despite the proliferation of manuscripts of the Quran, and its extensive use in the highly developed art-form of calligraphic embellishment, it is primarily a series of texts designed for oral transmission.

Not all Westerners are as sympathetic. Available to them mostly in translation, the Quran was declared by most to be a “repetitious” and “incoherent” read.

Thomas Carlyle, the 18th century essayist, was particularly harsh in his judgement. He found it “as toilsome reading as I ever undertook ... nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran”, adding with as much incoherence as he found in his subject: [It is] “a wearisome confused jumble [marked by] crude, incondite, endless iterations [and] longwindedness entanglement ... insupportable stupidity, in short!”

The 19th century German classicist, Goethe, on the other hand, came to this mixed conclusion:

However often we turn to it [the Quran], at first disgusting each time afresh, it soon attracts, astounds, and in the end enforces our reverence ... Its style, in accordance with its contents and aim, is stern, grand terrible - ever and anon sublime ... Thus this book will go on exercising through all ages a most potent influence.

Once again, it is Ruthven who puts in an empathetic plea for the Quran. Its “mixed character” and “seemingly arbitrary sense of organization”, he observes, are well suited to the purpose at hand. Westerners, he suggests, should see the Quran for what it was, a series of “one-way dialogues” between God and the Prophet and between Muhammad and his auditors.

The effect is not unlike listening to a person speaking on the telephone: one only hears half the conversation. The inaudible part of the discourse, Muhammad’s unspoken questions, the arguments of his critics, and so forth have to be constructed out of the exegetical literature, which draws on the vast body of hadith-tradition. (Ruthven, 1985: ).

b) A variety of different materials make up the text: A simple content analysis shows that the various themes covered by the Quran belong to at least four distinct categories, reinforcing its image of a “mixed scripture” in Western eyes. Four such ctegories can be easily identified:

i) spiritual and cosmic truths received during Muhammad’s first decade as prophet spent in Mecca where he met with stiff tribal resistance to his new religious and social teachings;

ii) religious history based on stories of earlier prophets and the fate that befell them for disobeying God’s commandments;

iii) penal legislation to deal with common problems of state arising during Muhammad’s second decade as prophet which he spent in exile in Medina to unwittingly become virtual head of the world’s first Islamic community; and,

iv) advice and instruction to the Prophet on how to cope with political and other mundane challenges arising in the course of his troubled political career in Medina.

It is not surprising if one finds an extremely mundane kind of verse in the body of the Quran. In it, the divine advice rendered to the Prophet is about the practical steps he should take as a precaution to ensure his personal safety against dangers that ever loomed over his life. Thus:

Verse 102 of chapter 4, in Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation, reads:

When you, O apostle, are at prayer with those who wish ill of you, let one group among them stand in line with you ensuring that their arms are with them. When they finish their prostrations, let them move to the rear, and let the other party that has not prayed join you but ensure that they bear their arms and you have taken all precautions. For, the Unbelievers would want you to be negligent so that they might rush at you and assault you. But there is no blame on you if you put away your arms because it is inconvenient to carry them for reasons of rain or your illness; so long as you take all precautions.

Due to this bewildering variety of elements - some spiritual, others mundane and quotidian – some scholars have raised the question, whether it is proper to regard all of the Quran as of equal weight and sanctity. Or, can some of its this-worldly verses be treated as ‘severable’ from its more spiritual ones? Some reformist exegetes have come up with innovative suggestions, notably the 19th cnetury author of the Spirit of Islam, Syed Ameer Ali, and more recently, professor of philosophy a Columbia University, Aqueel Bilgrami. Their suggestions about the ‘severability’ of the verses of the Quran will be fully dealt with in a later Section.

To sum up, then, the three historical peculiarites outlined above are far too important for a objective student of Islam to ignore. Even at the risk of repeating them, these are: a) while the Quran is a faithful record of the Prophet’s revelations, these were reproduced unedited by his scribes after his death; b) when the Quran’s verses were collated into a volume, it was done without regard to context or chronology; and c) the Quran’s contents are made up of a large variety of different elements: legislation, narratives of prophets of old, and advices to the Prophet.

x x x

The cumulative result of these various factors, I belive, renders the Quran a very difficult scripture to interpret. (In a subsequent Section of my book, I hope to offer some proposals that may help to overcome this difficulty).

Islam in Crisis - Part 3 Re: mijope`s personal msg to me #43
Mikael and Lena: Such a pleasant surprise to get this msg from you - thanks of course to Chowk where ``ideas and identities intersect``. When you were in Delhi, I thought I had given you copies of the first two my `Islam in Crisis` pieces. One more - part 3 - is now posted on Chowk as are parts 1&2. There are some sequels and I shall send these to you or if the editors of chowk agree to carry them, you will be able to see them posted here. My e-mail is rasheedtalib@hotmail.com

Islam in Crisis - Part 3 dost-mitter #27 Are you etc

If I know whom you have in mind, yes I am. Rasheed Talib

Islam in Crisis - Part 3 #4: Thank you, `Freethinker`` Mohammad Gill, for your corrrection. You are right while summarizing the Mutazilites` view on the Quran in a very early para of my piece, I erred. I did mean to write that a `created` Quran meant for them a `non-eternal` Quran, and an `uncreated` Quran an `eternal` Quran. My principal point, however, whichTI believe must have come through in my piece, warts and all, was that the Mutazilites believed that the Quran was `created` scripture, therefore `non-eternal`, as against the Asharite view that the Quran was `uncreated` meaning an eternal scripture, in fact one that was co-eternal with God. There are many flaws in thislatter argument which I hope to spell out one day. For the moment, let me say that I have apologised to the editors of Chowk for my egregious error. May I add here that I very much look forward to reading your erudite essays on Chowk from which I derive a great deal of benefit. Rasheed Talib

Creation of Hindu ’madrasas’ I have only two short comments. I want to thank Sadna #10 for her very penetrating critique of my Hindu madrasas piece, and to thank to Layman #9 for pointing out my error about the date of the Babri masjid demolition: it was indeed 1992, 10 years ago, not 20 years as I erroneously wrote. Rasheed

Creation of Hindu ’madrasas’ This is brief response to Romair`s #42 comment of Dec 27 to my article on the Hindu madrasas of Dec 26, 2002:
This is an immediate reaction to your excellent comments on my article. I have not been able to take in all of them. But for the moment, I would say that your point about us Indians being obesssed with Pakistan is well taken. In the present case, I was trying to depict concretely for my Indian readers the horrible future awaiting us if we ``go down the slippery slope`` and become ``a mirror image of Pakistan``. Also, that it is not entirely a coincidence that our present eductiaon system has produced the brightest I-T whiz kids in the world. Incidentally, as I pointed out in my piece, Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy is a well-respected, though dissenting. member of Pakistan`s scientific establishment.