Opening the Qur'an

Introducing Islam's Holy Book

Walter H. Wagner

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780268044220
• eBook ISBN: 9780268096540
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Opening the Qur'an can be a bewildering experience to non-Muslim, English-speaking readers. Those who expect historical narratives, stories, or essays on morals are perplexed once they pass the beautiful first Surah, often shocked and then bogged down by Surah 2, and even offended by Surah 3's strictures against nonbelievers. Walter H. Wagner "opens" the Qur'an by offering a comprehensive and extraordinarily readable, step-by-step introduction to the text, making it accessible to students, teachers, clergy, and general readers interested in Islam and Islam's holy Book.

Wagner first places the prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an, and the early Muslim community in their historical, geographical, and theological contexts. This background is a basis for interpreting the Qur'an and understanding its role in later Muslim developments as well as for relationships between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. He then looks in detail at specific passages, moving from cherished devotional texts to increasingly difficult and provocative subjects. The selected bibliography serves as a resource for further reading and study. Woven into the discussion are references to Islamic beliefs and practices. Wagner shows great sensitivity toward the risks and opportunities for non-Muslims who attempt to interpret the Qur'an, and sympathy in the long struggle to build bridges of mutual trust and honest appreciation between Muslims and non-Muslims.

PART I

APPROACHING THE QUR’AN

ONE

RISKS, PERSPECTIVES, AND UNDERSTANDINGS

To each is a goal to which Allah turns him; then strive together (as in a race) toward all that is good. Wheresoever ye are, Allah will bring you together. For Allah hath power over all things.

Surah 2:148

Being introduced to and introducing others to a religion involves risks and opportunities. We come with culturally conditioned understandings about ourselves and the faith we are about to consider. Those understandings are confirmed, corrected, adapted, or amended as we engage the other religion and its believers. No matter how “objective” a person may think he is or how committed he feels he is to his own position, the other faith challenges with its questions and causes us to rethink that which we hold and why. As we prepare to open the Qur’an, I mention three sets of general risks and opportunities I have encountered. The key questions are “Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God? Is Islam the true religion? Is the Qur’an God inspired? Is Muhammad a genuine prophet?” The several options for answering these questions color how we consider the Qur’an and Islam. The chapter concludes with three Muslim perspectives on the Qur’an.

THREE SETS OF RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES

The first set is a double confrontation. The Muslim college student from Pakistan was irate. Since I introduced the Qur’an, spoke respectfully of Muhammad, and presented Islam accurately to the class, he assumed that I would convert to Islam. When I remained a Lutheran-style Christian, he reproached me with a Quranic forecast for my fate: “As to those who reject Faith, it is the same to them whether you warn them or do not warn them: they will not believe. Allah has set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing, and on their eyes is a veil. Great is the penalty they (incur)” (Surah 2:6–7). Almost simultaneously, the born-again Christian student from New Jersey demanded that I denounce Islam as blasphemy, Muhammad as a lecherous fraud, and the Qur’an as a satanic ploy to delude the gullible. As an ordained member of the clergy, she said, I was obligated to proclaim Jesus as the only Lord and Savior for, according to John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Each student was convinced that his and her own religion was the only truth and insisted that the introducer respond as each expected. They called for answers that neither equivocated nor took refuge in bland relativism nor feigned “objectivity.” Yet within the risks to my academic accountability and personal integrity were opportunities for us to assess our positions through study and dialogue.

The second set of risks and opportunities involves self-examination and the possibility of changing one’s views. The testy parishioner intended to argue with the Muslim couple I invited to address the congregation’s adult forum. His opposition faltered when the wife-mother-veterinarian spoke of her daily reading of the Qur’an for guidance in raising their children and in her own spiritual life. She shared her worry about the spread of vulgarity and obscenity in the media because she felt the morals of all adults and children were being corrupted. The husband-father-businessman witnessed that he began each day by prostrating himself before the Lord of all and repeated often the opening words of the Qur’an, “In the Name of God, most gracious, most merciful,” as he undertook daily routines. He strove to direct his attitudes and actions toward clients and employees in light of the Qur’an’s ethical standards. The parishioner started to rethink his earlier hostility to Islam and Muslims, then began to recalibrate at a higher level how his faith could be expressed in his whole life. He realized that in spite of sharp differences, Muslims and non-Muslims shared common concerns and aspirations and might even risk cooperating with each other.

The third set puts the study of religion, specifically Islam, in sociopolitical context. A student in our seminary class on Christian-Muslim relations took a copy of Yusuf Ali’s translation to her office. A coworker saw her reading the Qur’an in the company’s cafeteria and promptly reported her to the security guards as someone who might blow up their building. Subsequently the personnel director criticized her for causing her fellow workers consternation, advised her to keep “that book” at home, and told her to assure the others that she was a loyal American. Opening the Qur’an is indeed risky.

BASIC PERSPECTIVES

Since we are preparing to open the Qur’an together, it is appropriate at the outset to share some perspectives that are both explicit and implicit in our study. Our endeavor is to understand the Qur’an, not for me either to persuade readers to convert to Islam or to denigrate it. At the same time, we will not ignore areas that are difficult and contentious among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims. Neither will I discuss whether or not Muhammad existed, or question the historicity of Muslim accounts about his life and the developments of the early Muslim community, or make judgments on the validity of the Muslim traditions about how the Qur’an came to be written and collated, or venture opinions about the morality of Quranic principles. Those matters are highly controversial, and when positions contrary to Muslim beliefs are advanced, Muslims deem them largely slanders on the part of Western “Orientalists” and blasphemies proffered by apostates from the Faith.1 For those interested in the views of several critics and criticisms, I have provided chapter 14. Instead, I deal with the Qur’an as we have it and with respect for Muslim views of it, the Messenger, and the Message. Further, while I recognize and occasionally refer to the serious differences and contrasts between Sunni and Shi‘ia Muslims as well as the divisions within those two broad groups, I focus on positions on which they agree. Where that is not possible or relevant, I defer to generally accepted Sunni positions.

The question at hand is, “Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God?”

PERSPECTIVES OF PERSONS WHO ARE NEITHER JEWISH NOR CHRISTIAN

Persons who are neither Jewish nor Christian consider the question on at least three grounds. First, if those persons are religious, they implicitly ask if they and Muslims worship the same God in some manner. Islam claims to absorb and fulfill their religions, as well as Judaism and Christianity. To some degree, non-Muslims will open the Qur’an with attention to its resonance with their own belief systems. Second, much of the scholarship in Western languages has been undertaken by Jewish, Christian, and religiously uncommitted scholars. Their methods and conclusions are colored by their responses to the question. All readers need to be sensitive to the perspectives of those who introduce readers to the text. Third, Jews and Christians are mentioned prominently in the Qur’an and in the foundation of the Muslim community. How those Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarded each other and how they are presented as relating to each other is part of the Qur’an’s content. For the theistically inclined, Tibetan Buddhism’s leader, the Dalai Lama, may provide a general response applicable to the question and its corollaries:

How are we to resolve this difficulty [that each religion claims to be the one “true” religion]? It is true that from the point of view of the individual practitioner, it is essential to have a single-pointed commitment to one’s own faith. It is also true that this depends on the deep conviction that one’s own path is the sole mediator of truth. But at the same time, we have to find some means of reconciling this belief with the reality of a multiplicity of similar claims. In practical terms, this involves individual practitioners finding a way at least to accept the validity of the teachings of other religions while maintaining a whole-hearted commitment to their own. As far as the validity of the metaphysical truth claims of a given religion is concerned, that is of course the internal business of that particular tradition.2

THE MUSLIM PERSPECTIVE

Muslims answer the question in the affirmative:

Say: “We believe in Allah and in what has been revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Isma‘il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and in (Books) given to Moses, Jesus, and the Prophets from their Lord; we make no distinction between one and another among them and to Allah do we bow our will (in Islam).” (Surah 3:84, al-Imran, Family of Imran)

They insist that Islam is the oldest and most natural of all religions and that it supersedes and draws into itself all other religions. Judaism and Christianity have a special relationship to Islam because they are the religions closest to Islam with regard to prophets, Scriptures, and practices. At the same time, Jews and Christians are considered to have misunderstood, corrupted, and been led astray from the clear truths proclaimed to them through those prophets and Scriptures. Nevertheless, the “People of the Book” (the Quranic term for Christians and Jews) worship Allah, even if mistaken and misguided.

THE TRADITIONAL JEWISH PERSPECTIVE

Although it is difficult for Jews and Muslims to divest themselves of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ political-military-social developments focused on Israel-Palestine, Jews follow the precedent stated by Maimonides (1135–1204). He conceded, somewhat grudgingly, that Christians and Muslims worship the same God as do Jews:

But it is beyond the human mind to fathom the designs of the Creator, for our ways are not His ways, neither are our thoughts His thoughts. All these matters relating to Jesus of Nazareth and the Ishmaelite (Mohammed) who came after him, only served to clear the way for King Messiah, to prepare the whole world to worship God with one accord, as it is written For then will I turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the Lord to serve Him with one consent (Zeph. 3:9).3

CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES

Throughout their history Christians have struggled with their relationships with other religions and the cultures that are part of those religions. Some Christian attitudes have remained constant; others have changed. A substantial body of literature has emerged dealing with those relationships.4 Since our focus is on the Qur’an and the perspectives through which it is seen and interpreted and not on interfaith relations, the following is intended to provide us with a basic context. The history of Christian–Muslim relationships is fraught with war, conflicting missionary efforts, political-economic domination, and heated rhetoric on both sides. It is also marked by mutual respect, reciprocal cultural enrichment, and humanitarian cooperation. Both Muslims and Christians have made claims about theirs being the only true faith through which a person may have blessed eternal life, and both have traditions that respect the other’s religious sincerity, leaving questions of salvation to the mercy and justice of God.5 How Christians respond to the question and its corollaries clearly influence and sometimes determine what they see and hear when they open the Qur’an. Generally, Christian considerations of the question may be grouped in three perspectives: exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist.6

The Exclusivist Perspective

The exclusivist perspective is maintained by many conservative Protestant Christians, including Christian missionaries and American evangelicals. The core position holds not only that there can be no salvation apart from faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior but also that since Jesus’ death and, as Christians believe, resurrection, God may be known only through him.7 That core may be extended to posit that prior to God’s revelation in Jesus, Jews were God’s covenanted people, but they did not discern the prophecies concerning the coming Messiah-Jesus in the Scriptures God gave them and did not accept him as the Messiah. As a result, such Christians believe, the Jews have forfeited their covenanted role as God’s Israel, even though they continue to worship the Creator. Jews and Judaism have been superseded by the Christian community. The Church is now the true Israel. The “New Testament” is the proper interpretation of the earlier Hebrew Scriptures (“Old Testament,” as Christians call it), and both Testaments are the inspired word of God. No other writings may be accepted at the same level of inspiration, just as there can be no other person or spiritual being who supersedes, supplements, or corrects the “good news” (gospel) of Jesus. Logically, then, every saving action and prayer is to be in and through Jesus to God the Father.

Exclusivists appeal for support to numerous passages in the New Testament and may cite the writings of past and modern Christian theologians.8 The core position can be extended to ask, Who or what, then, do believers in religions apart from Judaism and Christianity worship? One response is to claim that the object(s) of that worship are false gods (often termed “idols”) and on occasion demons.9 Applied to the key question and its corollaries, exclusivists are clear: Muslims worship a false god, and neither Islam, nor the Qur’an, nor Muhammad is divinely inspired, and Muslims are in danger of being eternally damned on the Day of Judgment.

Inclusivist Perspectives

The inclusivist position is expressed in three major ways. Each holds that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship and seek to serve the same God and are in some way included in God’s inscrutable saving will—yet the Christian way of worshiping and serving the one God is the clearest and closest to God’s revealed truth about Godself. Frequently the expression “Abrahamic Faiths” is used to relate the three monotheistic religions through a common “father.”10 Again, biblical and historical precedents may be cited to support the inclusivist perspective.11

Roman Catholicism’s Second Vatican Council (1962–65), while definitely affirming that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God and are embraced in God’s plan for salvation, did not address the thornier issues of the Qur’an and Muhammad.12 At the same time, the Council held that religions other than the form of Christianity as professed by Roman Catholicism are “not on an equal footing with Christianity. These other religions contain many authentic values, although they are mixed with error, and hence need to be purified.”13

Eastern Orthodox theologians emphasize that God in God’s being is unknowable, but humans see the light of God’s revelation in terms of God’s wisdom and glory throughout creation.14 Human...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chronology, from 570 to 680 CE
• Part I. Approaching the Qur’an
• Part II. The Qur’an Opened
• Part III. The Ever-Open Qur’an
• Appendix A. Traditional Names and Order of Surahs
• Appendix B. Biblical Figures Mentioned in the Qur’an
• Appendix C. Glossary of Key Terms
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Religious Texts