The Pen and the Faith

Eight Modern Muslim Writers and the Qur'an

Kenneth Cragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135030452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is happening in Islam is of concern to more than Muslims. The Qur'an is the prime possession of Muslims: how then, are they reading and understanding their sacred Book today? This volume, originally published in 1985, examines eight writers from India, Egypt, Iran and Senegal. Their way with the Qur'an indicates how some in Islam respond to the pressures in life and thought, associated in the West with thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Marx, Camus, Kafka, Jung, Fanon and De Chardin.

1

Introduction

I

The sense of possessing a Scripture — a Scripture which finalises all others — is the very making of the Muslim. It follows that there is nothing more important than the sense the Scripture possesses. The word ‘Qur’ān’ means literally ‘reading’ as ‘recital’. It is a Book to be heard in chant and transcribed in calligraphy. But these arts of possession await the art of interpretation. Only wise exegesis, attending on recitation and perusal, fulfils in the soul and in society what is cherished on the lips and in the memory. The text in the reciter's sequences passes into the context of the reader's world. The Qur'ān is precious and crucial as given to the one. It is no less so as received in the other.

In this passage from page to life, from authority inhering to meaning applied, responsible Muslim faith has both its vocation and its tests. In what is widely identified as the first revelation (Surah 96.4), the Qur'ān celebrates the pen of the writer. Mankind is taught by that which is at once the lesson and the instrument. The pens first inscribing the Qur'ān, in its collection through the years of Muhammad's mission and into its recensions after his death, bequeathed to the pens of commentators the tasks of its interpretation as the Book of its people. The sacred Scripture acquired its margins of reception. Tafsīr, or exegesis, within Islam is at once the token of loyalty and the arena where loyalty must work. Calligraphy is the first sacred duty of the pen, commentary the second.

The aim of this book is to take stock of Quranic reading on the part of eight outstanding writers in their context of time and place this century. It is to appreciate how they were guided by the Qur'ān and how awareness of their Muslim setting affected their discernment of what its guidance might be. For discernment is vital in reading any Scripture, not only because any text requires thought and scholarship but because fidelity has to be resourceful and situations are perplexing. Moreover, both mind and spirit are subject to the hazards of emotion or impulse, or the interests of causes and conflicts which may distort or obscure the intention of the Scripture — an intention which, in the human situation for which revelation itself is given, must necessarily engage with the intentions of the reader.

These may be caught up in what the Qur'ān, in several passages, sees as ‘supposition’ (ẓann) (e.g. 49.12): ‘O you who believe, steer well clear of supposition.’ Nowhere is the business of integrity with meaning more exacting than where, as in Islam, a faith once and for all documented has to be interpreted and obeyed in a world now and ever in flux and transition. By its own rubric, the Qur'ān contains both things categorical and things metaphorical, meanings that are absolute and meanings that are similitudes (3.7). Faced with these, it warns, there are those of deviant heart desiring to strain the interpretation in line with their own deviance, so putting themselves in a state of fitnah, or disputatious rebellion against the true word.

Both ẓann and fitnah are terms of high reproach in the vocabulary of the Scripture and tradition of Islam. Though we meet them in political issues and communal history, the fact that they may lurk in the ink-wells and the sacred margins means that the Scripture itself is not immune from the partisanship of its own custodians in its very name. The ultimate interpretation, Surah 3.7 warns, is known only to God. Yet precisely because that is so and He has, nevertheless, committed it to human readerships, these must aspire to interpret consonantly with Him even when properly disclaiming any assurance that they do so. The will to such consonance may take many forms and seek many aids, rational, mystical, traditional, and intuitive. But, at best, we may only be encountering the meaning on the lowest of the seven, or the seventy, ‘levels’ the Qur'ān possesses, the one, that is, on which it addresses our finitude. Mere personal opinion (ra'y) is quite inappropriate to the elucidation of such sanctity. Yet, in measure, personal ‘opinion’, duly disciplined and chastened, is all that the believer possesses when, pen in hand, he addresses mind and heart to a revelation that finds him in document and language, which invites him to ‘recite’ and ‘read’. Chant and calligraphy could not well undertake, in sound and shape, the artistry of worship, without mind and heart having their due role, however circumspect, in the reception of their meaning.

What will such role require in the tangled circumstances of contemporary Islam? Answer is sought here by a study of eight representative thinkers whom we assess in their use of the Qur'ān. The hope is to elucidate their attitude to the major themes in which conviction and conjecture are at issue within Islamic loyalty. The names fall roughly into four pairs, two being men of affairs of state, two activists of revolution, two primarily academics or men of scholarship, and two men of letters and imaginative literature. These categories, however, are not rigid or exclusive. The subcontinent of India is represented by three writers, Egypt by three, Iran and Senegal by one each. The reasons for their selection will be clear from the presentation. Broadly comparable positions could, in most cases, have been studied in other minds and sources.

Only two, Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Azad, have in fact published commentaries on the actual text of the Qur'ān, the former a monumental one. Fazlur Rahman has a thorough work on Major Themes of the Qur'ān, while Mamadou Dia and Kamil Husain wrote essays in which they evaluate the use of the Qur'ān by others and outline their own attitude. With Ali Shariati and Hasan Askari intriguing angles on Islamic Scripture emerge, in the one case that of social revolution and, in the other, that of response to religious pluralism. As for the novelist Najib Mahfuz, with whom we conclude, there is in his writing almost no direct comment on the Qur'ān or quotation from it. But his whole stance involves the most radical exploration of all into the viability of a contemporary theism and of the faith about prophethood which almost all Islam sees as the fundamental core of religion. It is he who invites all commentary — though by implication only — to the most exacting dimensions of its duty. For he raises a haunting spectre of the futile and the absurd which threatens all credence in ‘prophets’ with pointlessness historically and all assurance about God with emptiness essentially. That he can only do so in the form of the novel is itself significant. Elsewhere, in the Christian tradition, the major disturbers of dogmatic confidence have been in the realm of imaginative literature, with its elusiveness to censure and its power to delineate anxiety without requiring to reassure it.

It will be useful to preface the individual studies with some brief review of the main areas of thought and life preoccupying all eight exponents chosen here. To do so will also serve to indicate the rationale of the selection. For there are still many thinkers and exegetes within Islam not evidently preoccupied with one or other of the anxieties and concerns here evident and operative. Such commentators may be significant in historical study. They are less relevant in probing issues of continuity and change.

II

There are four dimensions of faith and of its definition and renewal within Islam exercising these writers today. Though India presents them in distinctive form, they are evident elsewhere even where the first of them does not obtain. They are: (1) minority condition, (2) secular pressures, (3) interrelations among Muslims, and (4) interrelations among religions. One can see at once how these are the arena of varying opinion, of personal and public judgement, of verdicts to be reached, and so of suppositions that arouse suspicion and the wisdom which knows how to resolve them. All these resort to the Qur'ān as the definitive norm by which they must be proved, thus drawing exegesis and interpretation into their stresses and anxieties.

Minority condition has been the major factor in Indian Islam since the collapse of the Mughal splendour in the early nineteenth century and more sharply still since the 1948 partition of the subcontinent. But Sayyid Qutb and Ali Shariati, in different terms, saw themselves in an Islamic minority in the Egypt of Abd al-Nasir and in the Iran of the Shah. Indeed Qutb characterised his setting as a Muslim fāhiliyyah and resolved on political revolt as the only valid option for a true Muslim. A de facto Muslim state may be far from being an Islamic one. The distinction between the two adjectives can be held to warrant revolution. In some senses the minority situation of (in his own eyes) the ‘true’ Muslim under an ostensible Islam may be worse than that under a non-Muslim majority.

Even so, it is the situation prevailing in Indian Islam which most expressly contains the stresses in which the Qur'ān has to be read. The career of Maulana Azad exemplifies what they entail. They belong much further back last century and are well illustrated in the campaign of Sayyid Ahmad Khan to reconcile Indian Muslims to a continuing British Raj after the events of 1857–8. Should they continue sullenly regretful of the forfeiture of Mughal glory and see themselves effectively disqualified of Dār al-Islām? Or should they identify the latter in their unimpaired religious rights and rituals, and meanwhile recover poise and assurance by a lively imitation of the West via education? The strain such an advocacy involved, both for a true self-esteem and for the sure political instincts of Islam, was too great for its wide acceptance, salutary though its orientation was in the immediate context.

After the turn of the century, the Khilafatist Movement sought to fulfil the political security of Islam by linking the Indian segment with the larger ‘pan-Islamic’ expression embodied, at least theoretically, in the fact of the Ottoman Caliphate. But the demise of that imperium after the First World War, by decision of the Turks themselves, made that hope sterile. In the emotional vacuum which followed for Indian Muslims came the crucial and ultimately divisive issue of how, in Hindu harness or otherwise, to expedite the departure of the British. The final verdict meant the decision for partition, for Islamic statehood where majority population could sustain it, and so for permanent non-majority condition for those whom partition excluded. The long and ardent labour of Maulana Azad for the contrary decision which would have ensured a united India measures how deep and searching that option was. Once the decision was taken, the very existence of Pakistan — as a state created in the name of the sole, alleged, circumstance of Islamic survival — spelled a perpetual disclaimer both of the position and the chances of Muslims beyond its borders. It became their vocation to survive without benefit of the condition which fellow religionaries in their majority areas affirmed to be the political sine qua non. Moreover, the presence over the border of the embodiment of that disclaimer of the Indian Muslim condition served for years as an active symbol working against the effort to defy and transcend it.

How many and fierce temptations to ẓann were here! No minority settling down to survival and participation within a secular state had a more exacting condition for Islam than had Indian Muslims. Gone beyond recovery was the traditional essential of power wielded by, and identified with, faith — not gone yet hopefully recoverable (as under the British Raj), but gone in perpetuity by a transition which both denied it and argued it as indispensable. To prove its dispensability was the long travail of Maulana Azad both before and after the die was cast. It is this which makes him so significant a figure in the counsels of Islam. Some of the aspects of his case will arise in section IV below concerning the Muslim and ‘alien’ religions. Here the salient point is his conviction that Muslims could appropriately participate in a statehood they did not dominate, that ẓann to the contrary harboured against Hindus and others could and should be repudiated in the creative taking of risk.

Minority condition even for those faiths which do not assume politicisation as Islam does holds strenuous temptations. The martyr complex is all too readily assumed. The dominant community always has to be suspected of designs to dominate, their will to ‘neutrality’ constantly doubted by those who find, or think, themselves on the receiving end of disadvantage. Yet acceptance, by Muslims, of the risks of a ‘secular’ statehood is the only way to prevent a Hindu one. Communal interests and institutions have to forfeit privileged sanctuaries no longer compatible with inclusiveness. They struggle to retain them as a second line of defence and so strain the mutual trust on which a larger, but still precarious, security depends.

These themes are all too familiar in India today. ‘Steer well clear of suspicion’ is an injunction hard indeed to fulfil when it has somehow to obtain across the frontier of ‘believers’, and relate to fellow nationals of another faith and worship. The situation is taxing both to mind and psyche. For it seems to place religion altogether outside the power realm. Absolute beliefs have to be sustained in a setting that relativises them. The guidance of religious authority and its exercise by the ‘ulamā’ have to proceed in an order of things which disallows their normal Islamic assumptions of what is proper to the faith. It is hard even to express in Urdu the idea of ‘secular’ statehood,¹ and to persuade Muslims that such a state need not necessarily be inimical to religion. Still more difficult is it to recognise in secular statehood an invitation to a humbler posture on the part of religion, a call to serve society from within and not from above, a destiny to achieve and prove one's mettle only amid diversity. In the loss of triumphalism and in a condition of orphanhood, inhibiting occasions of ẓann are all too plentiful. It is in the light of this experience over many years that Quranic reading must be set, if we are to discern how its authority obtains in an order of things so contrasted with those of its first time and place.

III

But the minority condition, in political terms, is only part of the equation. When we distinguish the ‘secularity’ of the state in the political sense of its legal tolerance of religious diversity (as we must certainly do) from the ‘secularisation’ of the mind and of society, we recognise an even sterner theme for commentary. Many of our writers, Najib Mahfuz most incisively of all, are reacting to the sense of religion on the defensive against what they see as the erosion of faith. Some, like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad of Tehran, in his Westitis, castigate the West as the source of all evils, the breeding ground of world-wide plague. Sayyid Qutb decides that the only defence is a total repudiation of the secular factor, and reserves his sharpest antagonism for those he identifies as its agents within — and traitors to — Islam. Kamil Husain, in his temperate way, fears only that the young will fail to distinguish the essence of religion from its dogmatic forms, approves the latter on psychological grounds only if they suit, and is sanguine about a ready compatibility of Islam and secularity provided both are rightly understood. For Ali Shariati the problems are almost wholly taken up into the political and social campaign where alone, in his view, they can be duly faced and resolved.

Exegesis has endless and taxing occasions here also, with opinion hardening into fear or distorted by resentment. Mental or institutional vested interests all too often preclude the kind of patient, perceptive response the situation requires and which, freed from panic and emotive anxieties, a Qur'ān exegesis should be well able to offer. Modernity, it is true, as Fazlur Rahman shows in his concern for a right reading of it, does present an unprecedented challenge to Islamic theism. The intellectual and spiritual aspects are compounded for many by the fact that, though empirical science owes much historically to Islamic civilisation, its current technological impact is almost entirely alien in its provenance and origin. The wise Muslim finds himself in a double battle to be objective and sober about the West while maintaining his proper quarrel with its political and economic relationships.

It is as necessary as it is difficult for Muslim thought and Quranic commentary to make proper reckoning with the travail of western spirituality in face of secular pressures which, though their impact may be delayed or blunted for a time, are liable to be universal in their incidence. There is no final answer here in the fundamentalist triumphalism which holds itself proudly exempt or in the purely defensive reassertion of traditional attitudes. Only Najib Mahfuz, it may be said, among our eight writers, has really penetra...