Omid Safi

Monotheistic traditions of the Abrahamic variety have commonly conceived of the Divine interactingwith this world through the Divine Word. No surprise, then, that the Qur’an refers to the Jews, Christians, and Muslims as “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab). Yet the task of seeking and finding God is not as simple as opening a book, even the Book. Reading religious words necessitates some self-awareness about the revelation’s context, the history of interpretations that stands between us and the text, and our own situatedness. What follows is a series of musings on these principles.

Listening to Stories

Children know how to listen to stories and indeed demand them. They become intimate with the characters and explore the magical realm of imagination with an unbound grace. Somewhere along the way, particularly in today’s world, grownups lose this ability or restrict it to science fiction and video-games (not to say anything about more perverse formats).

This is relevant to our task here. The Qur’ans’ narratives always work at multiple levels. At one point, surely, they refer to historic individuals and communitieswho heeded or disobeyed God’s call. Yet undoubtedly there are other levels at which the characters refer not so much to external personages, but to faculties and tendencies within us. How often does aMuslim sage like Rumi ask us who is the Moses of our soul? Does not a part of our nafs insist, Pharaoh-like, that it too is a god/goddess? How often do these Sufis remind us that the Divine’s presence in us resembles Christ’s birth out of Mary, a painful process that one has to endure on the path, and that if we do not endure this love-pain, then the Christ of Spirit will return to the realm from which it came? At this level, we see the Qur’an not as a historical text per se, but as a map to the realm of the spirit. As in the Qur’an, so within us. For many modern readers, their/our ability to listen to stories has become flat. Here again it would help to be like children, who, after all, are closer to their primordial nature (fitrah).

Which Texts

What are we reading today? It is a cliché to say that everyone refers to the Qur’an and Sunnah. But what range of texts are we studying, and from which centuries? Do we study only Arabic texts from the eighth to thirteenth centuries, or dowe engage the full range of Islamic scholarship from Malaysia to Morocco over the full 1,400 years of Islamic thought and life? Do we restrict ourselves to the sacrosanct disciples of the Qur’an and fiqh, or do we include all of the Islamic knowledge produced by Muslims? Even a cursory look at the texts used in many madrasas (and madrasa-like institutions) today leads one to conclude that a deliberate process of selectivity deems which texts are authoritative and normative and that whole subsets of texts are being marginalized. This is not to dismiss the good work being done, only to call attention to what is falling by the wayside.

Here is one example that can never be allowed to be marginal:where are women’s voices? We have a limited number of premodern texts written by women in their own voices. From the realm of Sufism, that crucial medieval Islamic body of knowledge and practice, what we know about Rabi`ah, the “Friend of God,” is most often preserved through the writings of men. How do we have an honest conversation about women’s access to God in a tradition that either does not record or else marginalizes their voices? To say that we are making progress in documenting their participation in many facets of Islamic life and practice – which we undoubtedly are – is not to say that we are anywhere near making sure that half of our understanding reflects their lives, experiences, wisdom, and learning about how to live beautifully and how to relate to God.

Under Whose Supervision?

It was said of the Prophet (S) that “his nature is the Qur’an.” He was the living and walking Qur’an, whose being and example was and remains the foremost commentary on the Divine revelation. And it has been this way for all exemplars who have followed in his path. It has become almost legendary to state that the text and living commentary go hand in hand, that the greatest truths cannot be found on a page but have to conveyed face-to-face, heart-to-heart.

But questions remain: today, when the texts are far more readily available, under whose guidance are they being read? Or, are they being read without the foremost commentary: their living exemplars?

Muslims Were Not Literalists

Traditionally speaking, Muslims have considered the Scripture to be God’s word. Since al-Zahir (The Manifest) and al-Batin (The Hidden) are both Divine Names, the word of God also has these dimensions. The only debate for premodern Muslims was how many inward layers the text contained and, just as importantly, who was authorized to access them. The Shi`i tradition had a different answer than the Sufi dimension, but both systems proceeded in a parallel fashion. Insisting that the Qur’an must be read only in a literal way is a modern aberration, a real bid`ah that, in many ways, has no substantial premodern corollary in the heart of the Islamic tradition.

In a way, one can argue that even Qur’anically speaking, one cannot give in to a crude literalism. In the Qur’an itself, in the ahsan al-qisas (the loveliest of stories), the Prophet Joseph is taught how to interpret dreams. His own dream, that of the eleven stars and the sun and the moon, signifies something else. It seems good and beautiful, and necessary, to remember this today.

Where Are Texts Being Read?

These above questions are inseparable from the place where the texts are being read. Historically, Muslims studied texts in religious academies (madrasas), mystical lodges (khanaqahs), and other settings. Texts were not only read and commented upon, but were recited, memorized, and, most importantly, lived. Part of the trauma of colonialism resulted in closing down or marginalizing madrasas (in favor of institutions for teaching sciences, thus creating aMuslim caste of doctors and technocrats during the twentieth century) and driving many khanaqahs underground.

So where are religious texts being read today? Many are being read in the modern university, and even more are floating around society and even on the Internet; some are being read in neo-madrasa settings like California’s Zaytuna Institute.

This is a mixed blessing, for while many traditional texts are more available to a larger group of people – including women, who may have been on the periphery of many madrasas – reading such texts, particularly mystical ones, in new settings risks engendering a further breakdown of normative structures at a time when a cacophony of voices are speaking Islamicly. At worst, there is also the possibility of profound misunderstanding, especially with respect to texts that seem to require a living commentary. At this level, the task of institutions like Zaytuna is both urgent and one that must be undertaken with the utmost seriousness and in an open spirit.

The Selective Tradition and Our Situatedness

Even if the idea of opening up the Qur’an for ourselves is a powerful one, full of democratic urges, we can never approach it with a tabula rasa. Our understandings are shaped both by the contingencies of our own time and by the 1,400 years of tradition standing between us and the Divine revelation. Our own situatedness implies that we approach the text selectively, approaching those verses that today are the subject of greatest scrutiny: the usual verses about women’s rights, violence, and relations with other communities. We know 4:34 by number (almost as famous as John 3:16), but do we know 21:107?

Just as important is the vast body of interpretive traditions standing between us and the origin of revelation. We never approach the text naively, purely, or innocently. Whether we are aware of them or not, a whole set of interpretive paradigms stand between us, both illuminating and occasionally blocking our path. One of the important aspects of this interpretative tradition was that in the premodern era it was always multiple, overlapping though not identical. Commentaries were grammatical, theological, philosophical, mystical, Shi`i, and other. Aside from the formal genre of Qur’anic commentary (tafsir), a wider and maybe even more influential tradition of indirect references to the Qur’an permeated poetry, arts and architecture, the lives of the prophets, and story-telling. In short, the fragrance of the encounter with God’s words permeated every facet of society. Beginning in Arabic, it spread through all of the main Islamic languages, from Persian, Turkish, and Urdu to Malay, Swahili, and others.

In much of the popular poetry, it would be enough to allude to a single Qur’anic phrase (e.g., qalu bala or amanna) or a phase from the hadith qudsi to jolt the listener into an awareness that what had seemed like an ordinary love poem was in fact love at the level of both human and divine, an all-subsuming love that thrived on ambiguity to encompass the whole cosmos. How often do we see a single phrase like lawlak (“were it not for you”) show up in poetry? This was a reference to the hadith qudsi, a private communication betweenMuhammad and God, that alludes to his exalted rank and, by extension, the positive nature of creation: “Were it not for you [O Muhammad], I [God] would not have created the Heavens and the Earth.” Here creation is not an exile, a sending-away from God, or a creation “out of” God. Rather, the creation of the whole cosmos is done through love, through God’s love forMuhammad, the cosmic Muhammad who is the cause of creation. We are created through love, are here for love, and on the buraq of love will find our way back to God. Creation is but a mi`raj of `ishq.

What to do with these seemingly extra-canonical references today? When we speak of the selective reception of the modern Islamic tradition, part of what is implied is that we have deliberately distanced ourselves from much of this medieval tradition’s philosophical, mystical, and poetic aspects. We do so at a great loss to our own spiritual life, for these traditions often lay out, most powerfully and evocatively, how we are led to God and how love and mercy are the very cause of the creation, the sustenance of our souls. Without the message of love and mercy, only a fractured sense of God is left. God is never fractured, however, but only our understandings of God.

The medievals always spoke of how God has to be approached through both jamal (the set of qualities dealing with beauty: love, mercy, compassion, grace) and jalal (the set of qualities dealing with majesty: awe, power, glory). Through the creative dance of jalal and jamal in the faithful servant’s heart, kamal (perfection) of the human spirit is reached. Looking at the selective reception of much of the modern Islamic tradition, it is hard not to conclude that we have abandoned jamal and are seeking to find God only through jalal. The result is all too often an austere and dry understanding of God that seems bereft of compassion and grace, not to mention love. No wonder we lack in kamal ourselves.

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