Islamic and Comparative Religious Studies

Selected Writings

William A. Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351925969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

William A Graham, a leading international scholar in the field of Islamic Studies, gathers together his selected writings under three sections: 1.History and Interpretation of Islamic Religion; 2.The Qur'an as Scripture, and 3. Scripture in the History of Religion. Each section opens with a new introduction by Graham, and a bibliography of his works is included. Graham's work in Islamic studies focuses largely on the analysis and interpretation of the religious dimensions of ritual action, scriptural piety, textual authority/revelation, tradition, and major concepts, such as grace and transcendence. His work in the comparative history of religion has focused in particular on the 'problem' of scripture as a cross-cultural religious phenomenon that is more complex than simply 'sacred text'. This invaluable resource will be of primary interest to students of the Islamic tradition, especially as regards Qur'anic piety, Muslim 'ritual' practice, and fundamental structures of Islamic thought, and to students of the comparative history of religion, especially as regards the phenomenon of 'scripture' and its analogs.

III

SCRIPTURE IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

Introduction to Part III

Part III brings together five studies that deal with the religious phenomenon of scripture, both as a generic phenomenon and as it functions specifically in particular traditions, from the Islamic to the Christian to the Hindu. A major focus here, as in several of the qur’ānic studies in Part II, is the oral/aural dimension of scriptural piety in many, if not most, of the great traditions of religious life that have relied upon sacred texts as mainstays of theology, ethics, liturgy and ritual, and both personal and communal piety.

The first essay, “Scripture” (Chapter 11), is the most general. It was written for the Encyclopedia of Religion (eds. M. Eliade et al.), which was first published in 1987. It was only lightly revised for the second edition which appeared in 2001. In this essay, I try to present scripture as a genre of religious text that is identifiable not by its form or content, but only by its relationship to a particular religious community and tradition. The same text may be scripture for one group and just another text for a different group. To be labeled “scripture”, a text has to be received by individuals and their community as one that is fundamentally different from all other texts, in that it possesses unique sacrality and authority in and for their lives. After a resumé of the origins and development of the concept itself, I seek further in the essay to do some justice to the huge variety of scriptures around the world, but also to discuss the most common recurring functions that mark a text or texts as sacred and authoritative. These are its roles as holy writ, as spoken word, in public ritual, in devotional life, and in superstition and magic. Next I try to identify characteristic attributes of scriptures: power, authority and sacrality, unicity, inspiration and eternality or great antiquity. Finally, I survey related developments such as canon formation, interpretation, and translation (and resistance to translation), and I close with some observations on the cultural impact of scriptural texts—in language, literature, art, architecture, and music.

The second essay, “Scripture as Spoken Word” (Chapter 12), moves to the oral dimensions of scriptural use and piety in the major scripture-based traditions of religious life around the world. (This essay was the preliminary study that led me ultimately to undertake the larger project on oral aspects of written sacred texts that is represented by Beyond the Written Word [1987].) Using as point of departure my previous work on the Qur’ān’s primarily oral/aural function among Muslims, I move into consideration of, first, the degree to which our modern (especially Western) high-literacy print culture, and within that, our modern scholarly culture in particular, have come to be dominated by the printed word—to such an extent that we have skewed our understanding of how our own Christian and Jewish scriptures have functioned in the past for the faithful and even more how Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or other scriptural “books” have functioned in fundamentally oral/aural ways for their faithful. The essay considers especially evidence from the Indian and Christian traditions, which at first blush seem very far apart in terms of their focus on oral or written textuality in their interactions with their scriptural texts. I try to show that we have missed in both cases the primarily oral dimensions of scriptural piety—in the Christian “book” tradition no less than in the Hindu “recited scripture” tradition. This fact has to be reckoned with for any adequate understanding of how scriptures function and “live” in any and all religious traditions.

The next two essays are from Beyond the Written Word. They are two of the four most focused and specific “case” studies in that work, each of which treats the oral function of written scripture in a single tradition or segment of a tradition (the four are the Indian (Vedic and later texts) tradition, the Islamic (Qur’ān) tradition, the scriptural tradition of early Christian monasticism, and the reformation Bible tradition represented in the writing and preaching of Martin Luther). Chapter 13 is a reprint of Chapter 6 of the book, “Scripture as Spoken Word: the Indian Paradigm”, under the simpler title, “The Indian Paradigm for Scriptural Orality”. It deals with the primary orality of the Vedas and even Purānic and later regional or sectarian sacred texts in Indian usage (some of this material is broached in brief in the previous article in this section as well). Chapter 14 is a reprint of Chapter 11 of the book, “God’s Word in the Desert”, to which I have added the subtitle, “Pachomian Scriptural Practice”. This is a study of oral engagement with Christian scripture among the Pachomian monastics in Upper Egypt in the third and fourth centuries, which provides a discrete case study in a single early Christian context of the fundamentally oral and aural function of the Bible in spirituality and practice.

The final selection (Chapter 15) is a paper that grew out of an opening plenary session address to the American Academy of Religion at its annual meeting in November 1989; I later reworked and expanded this (at the request of my Japanese hosts) into another plenary address, this time to the Japanese Association for Religious Studies annual meeting held in Tenri in September 2003. In its latter form, as “Reflections on Comparative Study in Religion: Scripture as Case in Point”, it offers a set of reflections on how I try to do, and suggest that we try to do, comparative study of religious phenomena. specifically, I base my suggestions on my experience of rather lengthy investigations in pursuit of the oral dimensions of written scriptures, which grew into Beyond the Written Word. It seems a fitting way to end this small collection, both because it confronts the issue of comparative study, which has been central to my scholarship and my teaching in particular over my career, and because it does so with specific reference to the various studies of scriptural traditions that have occupied me in one way or another for much of the last three decades.

CHAPTER 11

Scripture¹

Scripture is the generic concept used in the modern West and, increasingly, worldwide, to designate texts that are revered as especially sacred and authoritative in all of the largest and many smaller religious traditions of world history.

As a General Concept

In popular and even in scholarly use today, the term scripture is commonly used as though it designated a self-evident and simple religious phenomenon readily identifiable anywhere in the world, namely the idea of a “sacred book”. However, as a concept adequate to encompass the functional roles of the great sacred texts of history, scripture is a term of considerable ambiguity and complexity.

In the first instance, the specific form and content of scriptural books vary sharply from tradition to tradition and even within a single scriptural corpus. Ritual books, legal maxims and codes, myths and legends, historical accounts, divine revelations, apocalyptic visions, ecstatic poetry, words of teachers and prophets, and hymns or prayers to a deity can all be found in scriptural texts. The love lyrics of the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, the talismanic prayers against evil in the last two sūrahs of the Qur’ān, Krishna’s self-revelation in Chapter 11 of the Bhagavadgītā, and the Buddha’s parable of the burning house in chapter 3 of the Lotus Sūtra have all had significant roles as scripture, yet they have little or nothing in common in terms of style, form, subject matter, or intent. Such disparity makes any reasonably comprehensive yet still simple definition of scripture as a literary genre impossible.

Second, a major obstacle to delimiting the phenomenon of scripture definitionally is its very medium of expression. The term scripture is usually reserved for religious texts that have been committed to the written or printed page, as the word itself and its common equivalents (e.g., “holy writ”) suggest. Yet in most religious traditions, sacred texts were transmitted orally in the first place and written down only relatively late. Nor do written sacred books exhaust the full range of texts that function clearly as scripture. The Hindu tradition, for example, presents a major problem for defining “scripture” in terms of the written word. Its holiest texts, the Vedas, have been orally transmitted for three millennia or more—for most of that time in explicit preference to (and even firm rejection of) writing them down. Despite their great length, they were not committed to writing but instead preserved in memory and verbatim recitation until relatively recent times. It may also be argued that nonliterate communities have oral texts that function in many ways similar to written sacred texts in literate societies, insofar as these cultures use traditional recitations in cultic practice or hold certain myths or other oral texts sufficiently sacred to be worthy of transmission over generations. For these reasons, a descriptive distinction between oral and written scriptures (or oral and written uses of the same scripture) may on occasion be necessary, even though etymologically the label “oral scripture” is a contradiction in terms and “written scripture” a redundancy.

A further ambiguity of “scripture” as a conceptual category lies in the wide variety of texts that might be classified as “scriptural”. A key problem in this regard involves those “classic” texts in literate cultures that have many cultural, social, and often even religious functions usually associated with more overtly “religious” texts. Examples would be the Iliad of Homer in later antiquity; the five (or six, nine, twelve, or thirteen) “classics” (ching) and the four “books” (shu) in traditional Chinese culture; the great Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyana, in India; and the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan) and Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) in Shinto tradition. Such texts do have “scriptural “qualities”, such as the veneration they inspire and the cultural and moral authority they command, and thus might be treated as “scripture” in certain contexts.

Another problem in delimiting and defining “scripture” is distinguishing the primary sacred text(s) of a religious tradition from others that are also sacred but secondarily so. Such distinction between a community’s preeminent scripture(s) and the rest of its sacred texts is helpful in understanding many religious traditions, but others not at all: in some cases, the panoply of texts revered is so great and the relative distinctions of authority and sacrality among them so unclear, variable, or unimportant that all have some legitimate claim to the title of scripture. In the Mahāyāna...