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Introduction
In the preface I gave an outline of the concerns of this study and of the approach which it adopts. This raises several important questions, of two basic types. Firstly, there are objections which would apply in general to any Western critical study of the Qurɔan. These are: (a) that it is inappropriate to study the Qurɔan from outside the perspectives of the Muslim faith-community; (b) that Western study of Oriental texts is set within a history of cultural imperialism; and (c) that much contemporary critical theory suggests that we should study the history of reader-response to the Qurɔan, rather than the Qurɔan itself. The first part of this chapter responds to these three objections in order to establish the legitimacy of this study in general terms.
Secondly, it will be necessary to say in specific terms how the study will be carried out. Here the issues discussed will be: (a) in what sense the Qurɔan is used as a source for this study; (b) why the Hadith are not also used; (c) the adoption of a thematic approach; (d) the chronological sequence of the Qurɔanic passages; and (e) an issue of terminology.
1.1 General Objections to this Study
1.1.a The Study of the Qurɔan by Non-Muslims
Critical studies of the Qurɔan by non-Muslims are often received by Muslims with suspicion and indeed hostility. As Rippin comments: ‘The perception of many Muslims towards a critical approach to the Qurɔan is of an attack from the outside’ (Rippin 1983, p.41), and in an essay entitled ‘The Qurɔan in the Inter-Faith Future’ Cragg writes that some Muslims will ‘question whether there is any posture appropriate to the Qurɔan other than complete and unquestioning submission’ (Cragg 1980, p.165).
A good example of the attitude defined by Cragg is provided by Abdul-Rauf’s essay ‘Outsiders’ Interpretations of Islam: a Muslim’s Point of View’. Towards the end of this piece, AbdulRauf states the traditional Islamic view of the divine authority of the Qurɔan, and of its transmission and compilation. He then makes the following comments on Western critical scholarship on the Qurɔan:
Why have certain orientalists wasted so many precious years of their lives trying to re-order the text of the Qurɔan chronologically under the assumption that a human hand played a role in the formation of the text? Such programs of research are not merely an offense to the consciences of millions of Muslims, but are also misleading and thus unworthy to be considered as scholarship. The pursuit of knowledge about the contexts and circumstances in which the various parts of the Qurɔan were revealed, a genre called ‘the occasions of revelation’ (asbāb al-nuzūl), represents a well-known discipline among early Muslim scholars…. These works present a ‘history’ of revelation that stands in conformity with the life of the Prophet, not a destructio of the tradition.
(Abdul-Rauf 1985, p.187)
One is struck here by Abdul-Rauf’s pitying surprise at the failure of orientalists to see the self-evident reasonableness of the traditional Islamic account of the Qurɔan and its origins. Even to consider the possibility that there was any human initiative in the production of the Qurɔan is merely to waste one’s time. Muslim scholars have established the contexts to which different Qurɔanic passages refer, so why should orientalists bother going over the same ground? While Abdul-Rauf may be quite right to question the claims of some orientalists, he seems remarkably unaware of how uncompelling his arguments are to the outsider, who by definition is neither committed to nor constrained by the traditional Islamic account of the origins of the Qurɔan. Underlying Abdul-Rauf’s approach seems to be the attitude that non-Muslims are welcome to study Islam, so long as they do not question traditional Islamic convictions.1
It can be argued that there is a certain logic to the attitudes of scholars such as Abdul-Rauf, given Islam’s foundation on the Qurɔan, and the nature of the Qurɔan’s self-attestation as a book ‘lā rayba fīhi’ (‘in which there is no doubt’, (2:2)), a book which can readily be understood to discourage the interrogation of its credentials (Cragg 1980, p.165). Arnaldez suggests that it is indeed the underlying Islamic conception of revelation which generates opposition to critical studies of the Qurɔan by those who do not acknowledge its divine origin a priori. He characterizes the Islamic response to such work as follows:
It is not acceptable to submit the very Word of God to historical criticism. God transcends time. He reveals what he wishes to reveal and in the manner he wishes to do so…. All comparative approaches are excluded; the Qurɔanic revelation is sheltered from all external influence…. The deep tendency of Muslim thinkers is to make of the Qurɔan a world unto itself, entirely definable by itself and by itself alone, a sort of impregnable fortress before which all human ventures directed against it must fail.
(Arnaldez 1983, p.7)
It may, then, be true that there is something deeply rooted in the Qurɔan’s view of its own authority that generates this sense of the inappropriateness of its being critically examined by the outsider.2 But to leave the matter there, fearful of offending Muslim sensibilities, would make sense only if there was a shared understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims that Islam is a matter of purely private significance, relevant only within the community of Muslim believers. However, there is clearly no such understanding, since Muslims generally believe that Islam is of universal significance and that the Qurɔan is addressed to all people.
This observation can be related in more concrete terms to two contexts in which Muslims cannot avoid encountering the ways in which outsiders perceive their faith, and here in particular their Scripture. Firstly, in the context of inter-faith dialogue (to which some Muslims are committed), it is crucial for all participants to be ready to see how their own cherished beliefs and practices strike those outside their faith-community. This readiness to see oneself and one’s faith through the eyes of the Other’, the outsider, is a necessary attitude to bring to any kind of dialogue. It should be noted that such an attitude does not imply a relativistic indifference to questions of ultimate truth, and can indeed co-exist with a firm confidence in the objective truth of one’s own beliefs. What it does involve is a willingness, at least as a preliminary exercise, to take the otherness of the outsider seriously, to attempt as far as possible to think as he or she thinks, even with regard to one’s own faith, and even when this is unsettling. Without such an attitude, dialogue is simply not possible. An implication of this for Muslims who are concerned with inter-faith understanding is that they will acknowledge unaggressively that non-Muslims formed in the traditions of Western scholarship will investigate the Qurɔan in the light of these traditions, and may thus come to conclusions about the Qurɔan which differ from those held by Muslims. The capacity of Muslim scholars to accept this is a measure of their readiness to engage with the Other’ as genuinely other.
Secondly, if one leaves aside the language of inter-faith understanding (which may or may not appeal to particular Muslims), one can make more or less the same point with reference to the widespread Muslim claim that Islam is the final and definitive religion for the whole human race. This point can be illustrated by reference to Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s publication A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Modern World (Nasr 1993). Nasr’s basic message is that the West is in a crisis which has its roots in a turning away from revelation to mere human reason. Muslims in the West are to commend Islam to the sick society in which they live as the only ultimate solution to its predicament. In order to commend Islam intelligently, however, Muslims must understand the West and its intellectual and cultural traditions.
Implicit in Nasr’s vision is the hope that the West will one day acknowledge the divine authority of the Qurɔan. So the question must be asked: how is it expected that this will happen, at least at the level of Western intellectual life? Will the West suddenly be converted to the Islamic view of the Qurɔan without any serious intervening intellectual process? Given the emphasis placed by Islamic apologetics on rationality, this is presumably not what is hoped for. But if not, what kind of process will intervene? Unless they intend to by-pass all critical engagement with the Qurɔan by simply asserting its divine authority as an unassailable given (an approach which should then be clearly stated), Muslims such as Nasr must expect such an engagement with the Qurɔan by those Western non-Muslims for whose sick culture it is offered as the remedy. However, this topic is absent from Nasr’s account of what is involved in Islam’s missionary engagement with the West.
A strikingly different approach to Nasr’s, much more open to hearing what the ‘Other’ might have to say about Islam and the Qurɔan, can be found in Akhtar’s study A Faith for All Seasons: Islam and the Challenge of the Modern World. To a far greater degree than Nasr, Akhtar demonstrates a capacity to understand how the Qurɔan might appear to the Western non-Muslim (Akhtar 1990, e.g. p.76). He acknowledges that ‘Sooner or later Islam must, like its monotheistic rivals, face the tribunal of secular reason and patiently endure “trial by modernity”’, and asks: ‘Are Islam and its scripture … capable of patiently tolerating disciplined investigation?’ (ibid., p.17: my italics) Later he argues that ‘Any constructive engagement between Islam and modernity must involve the rejector [i.e. the non-Muslim]: the rejector must reserve the right to examine critically the contents of the Koran’ (ibid., p.68; cf. pp.31–2). Although in this study Akhtar does not provide us with the kind of critical engagement with the Qurɔan which he advocates, and although he admits that his views are not widely representative of Muslim thinking (ibid., p.viii), his words are nevertheless an important reminder that there is more than one kind of Muslim attitude to the Other’.
This non-Muslim study of the Qurɔan stems, then, from an awareness of the unavoidable necessity to take seriously a book which is believed by hundreds of millions to be the Word of God. Muslims can expect courtesy in those who write about the Qurɔan, and giving wilful offence is certainly no part of my intention. However, so long as Muslims challenge non-Muslims to take the message of their Scripture seriously, they will need at least to tolerate the conclusions which such outsiders come to in the course of their studies. ‘Non-Muslim reckoning with the Qurɔan must have its due place and so also must an Islamic relation to such external bearings of their Scripture’ (Cragg 1971, p.185).
A final comment. I have been speaking of this work as a study by a non-Muslim, but I should also say more specifically that I write as a Christian. Although this will rarely emerge explicitly in the course of the study, at many points it will doubtless be evident to the reader. As will be discussed below (pp.12–13), there is no neutral vantage-point from which texts can be read; we cannot block out all our prior assumptions. No such claim to a supposed objectivity is made for this study. The fact that I am a Christian has certainly shaped the way I have read the Qurɔan, as has the more general fact that I am a Western non-Muslim. It is to be hoped, however, that none of this provides grounds for dismissing such a study a priori.3
1.1.b Orientalism
A related question which should be raised in this introduction, however briefly, is that associated with the work of Edward Said, especially in his study Orientalism (Said 1985). His thesis has been summarised as follows:
Following Michel Foucault, Said argues that Western orientalism has developed ways of ‘discoursing’ about the Orient (by which he means primarily the Muslim Orient, particularly the Arab) that establish and perpetuate a sense of European cultural superiority over that ‘other’, ‘alien’ culture.
(Martin 1985, p.14)
Said’s claim is thus that the wider relationship between the Orient and a politically and economically dominant West has deeply moulded Western writing on Islam, leading to seriously distorted perceptions of it.
By reminding Western orientalists of the context within which they work, Said issues an important challenge which should be kept in mind. However, there are serious problems with his approach. For example, Said has been criticized for ‘offering an interpretation that is more blatantly ethnocentric and politicized than most of the targets of his own criticism’ (ibid., p.15). A review of a later work by Said detects within it a ‘kind of unsustained, facile inverse colonialism’ (Gellner 1993, p.3). In other words, it is not just Western orientalists who need to heed Said’s warnings. Said also leaves it unclear what the way ahead should be. He says himself that he has done little to help in this respect by asking ‘how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective…. These are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study’ (Said 1985, p.24). As Martin says, Said’s essay ‘has elicited much righteous indignation on both sides, but has spurred little helpful communication’ (Martin 1985, p.15).
Every study with an inter-cultural dimension to it must be alert to the issues raised by Said; one cannot ignore the wider cultural, economic and political situation in which one lives and works as if one is uninfluenced by it. Nevertheless, such awareness need not breed a paralyzing fear that all attempts to understand the ‘Other’ are doomed from the start. Akbar Ahmed suggests that it is time ‘to move beyond Said’s arguments. In an important sense he has led us into an intellectual cul-de-sac’ (Ahmed 1992, p.185). In the end, Western students of the Orient, like everybody else, can only do their best, aware of the limitations of their perceptions, and humble enough, one hopes, to have them corrected.
1.1.c Recent Critical Theory and the Study of the Qurɔan
An interesting development in Western Islamic studies in recent decades has been a movement away from the study of the Qurɔan itself to the study of Tafsīr, Muslim commentary on the Qurɔan. No student of Islam should underestimate the importance of the Tafsīr-tradition, so the increasing attention paid to it is welcome. However, one reason for this shift of focus from Qurɔan to Tafsīr is the view that it is misguided to attempt to study the Qurɔan itself apart from the Tafsīr-tradition which has grown up in response to it. Sin...
