It is obvious that the Quran is not an ordinary book. It is mystical. It is beautiful. It is controversial. It is melodic but not a song. It is poetic but not a poem, nor is it prose. It is very clear and easy to understand but at the same time quite ambiguous and cryptic. It speaks about itself, unlike any other book. It is highly assertive and challenging. It brings the past to the future and future to the past. It addresses not only the believers as its audience but also to the entire humanity. It is very logical and rational but at the same time sentimental. It is a book of guidance, a book of the remembrance , a book of the stories of the previous messengers, a book of law and social justice, a book of inner peace, a book of healing and inspiration, a book of the hereafter, and a book of the visible world and unseen, etc.
As Bediuzzaman Said Nursi says Quran gets younger and fresher as the time gets older. It answers the three fundamental questions to which all the philosophers tried to answer but have been unsuccessful; where did we come from, why did we come, and to where are we going? It is a book beyond cultures and ages. It relates to and astonishes modern twenty-first-century minds, as much as it did seventh-century minds of a forsaken land. But it is certainly not a simple book that can be read from cover to cover like a best-seller novel. Each chapter is as if a self-standing Quran. That is why Imam Shafi says “if God had only revealed Surah al-Asr, it would have been sufficient for the guidance of all humankind.”[1] But at the same time chapters are connected to one another because many terms are described in other chapters, and details of stories are explained in the other chapters. Therefore, surahs are independent but also interconnected at the same time. And the most interesting aspect is the Messenger who recited it, was illiterate and it was completed over a span of twenty-three years.
But how should we approach the Quran today, and introduce it to the people in the West, and most importantly how should we teach it to our children who are growing up in the West? As we were growing up in Turkey, we learned how to read Quran with traditional methods (and unfortunately sometimes along with corporal punishment) at a very early age but we didn’t have any clue what it was saying. In fact, reading translations was discouraged. And when I read it in Turkish for the first time, I understood why. As a teenager, it lost all its glory and magic in my eyes in translation. I couldn’t understand it. It was repetitive, ambiguous, and boring. Yet, I didn’t lose my faith in it, because reciting and listening it, was giving my soul tranquility. When specific ayahs were explained separately, they were making sense, but it was almost impossible to read its translation from cover to cover. So, it is very important how we introduce it to our children and to the Western audience who look at the world from a very materialistic perspective. They won’t be as faithful as we have been when they feel it is not appealing to them.
Handing a copy of the Quran to a non-Muslim and expect him/her to read and understand it, is not realistic. Although many converts convert just by reading a translation, most of the people won’t have that kind of patience or dialectic mind that will tune in to Quran’s cognitive wit. I found Michael Sells’ introduction to his “Approaching the Quran” very helpful except the parts where he dived into Islamic history. His emphasis on the pre-Islamic Arab poetry gives a notion that the Quran is merely a masterpiece of Arabic poetry. Also, I found his reference to the invention of a camel saddle quite odd.[2] It seemed to me that somehow Sells tries to explain the advancement of the Islamic civilization with a new saddle which the Bedouins invented in the seventh century. But other than those two issues his explanation of the delicacies of the language of the Quran was quite remarkable. I also greatly benefited from Joseph Lumbard’s “What is Quran According to Quran” [3] series and his “Quran in the Translation”[4] article. Lumbard introduces the Quran in its own voice and lets Quran speak for itself. His explanation of inimitability of the Quran and its syntactic features such as iltifat through pronouns and tenses were something all first-time readers of the Quran should be aware of. He demonstrated how specific words in Quran can carry different meanings and all those meanings can be valid at the same time in the example of ayah 2:177.[5] Although it is one of my favorite ayahs and I recite it quite often, I hadn’t seen this subtlety before nor was it pointed out in any of the translations I read.
I think the major factors that need to be considered in approaching the Quran in the West are; i-Orientalism, ii-Islamophobia, and iii- Historical context of the ayahs, and iv- Controversial ayahs. Average peoples’ paradigms are loaded with biases established by the media over decades even centuries. During the middle ages, when Islamic civilization was on the rise, Islam’s image in the Christian world was a mixture of admiration and envy. Unfortunately, during those centuries Islamic world didn’t make any effort to introduce Islam to the West through anything other than wars. During those centuries, Christianity’s image in the East was not any different than the Islam’s image in the West during and after the Renaissance; which was basically ‘infidel nations with backward, barbaric customs.’ During the colonization age this image was reinforced further due to the internal conflicts in the Islamic geography.
The first translations of the Quran to the European languages were quite prejudiced and full of misconceptions. The scholars generally lacked adequate level of Arabic and Islamic history. For example, “George Sale (1697-1734), a solicitor by profession who never left his native country, was the first layman to translate the Quran into English. Judging by his lack of formal education in Arabic, and the fact that there was little Arabic in his library, especially on the Quran, it is difficult, according to Denison Ross, who introduced the 1909 edition of Sale’s translation, to assume that Sale’s mastery of the Arabic language would have enabled him to translate directly.”[6] Later, during the second half of the 20th century Islam was mostly mentioned in the West with Palestinian-Israeli conflict. That orientalist image was also tainted with terrorism because of the plane hijackings, Iranian revolution, and finally September 11. Today, as the Muslims living in the West, we have a huge responsibility to save Islam’s image in the West that was hijacked by Al-Qaida and Islamic State. I think Islamic studies and scholarship play the key role in this respect.
The historical context of the ayahs is very important in understanding and explaining the Quran for the Western audiences as well as for us, Muslims. It is a common mistake for most of us that we often judge historical events and facts through today’s standards. We tend to forget that the concepts such as Democracy and human rights are pretty new in the humanity’s history, less than a century old. Slavery, patriarchy, corporal and capital punishments were the realities of humanity for thousands of years. Although the Quran is a book of guidance it was not revealed to force an artificial progress in humanity’s socio-economic evolution. Yet it does not deny progress in social issues. Just like Quran itself abrogated some of its verdicts as in the case of alcohol, other verdicts might be abrogated due to the socio-economic changes in time. We see examples of this in the life of the Prophet and Khalifs. This is an important issue that needs to be discussed in the Western Quran scholarship.
I personally have a terrible memory of one of the most controversial ayahs, an-Nisa:34[7]. In a presentation I made in a community college about Islam, I was asked if this verse is abrogated today or not. I was young and unprepared for the question and my English was poor at the time, and I answered the question in a way I wouldn’t do today. Over the years I came to conclusion that Quran is like DNA. We have the same DNA in all our cells, all over our body, but some sections of this DNA are functional and other sections are inactive based upon the location of a cell in the body. Just like that some of the ayahs might have been valid in certain places at a certain time in the history, but they might be inapplicable today. Whether hadd ayahs should be seen in this regard or not, is a matter, contemporary fiqh scholars should decide.
Said Nursi says in his Letters, in interpreting a dream he saw before the First World War, “I awoke and I understood that there was going to be a great explosion and upheaval, and that following it the walls surrounding the Qur’an would be destroyed. The Qur’an would then defend itself directly. It was going to be attacked and its miraculousness would be its steel armor.”[8] I believe we don’t need to defend Quran or apologies for it, we just need to let Quran speak for itself.
[1] Recite Quran, Tefsir Ibn Kathir/Al Asr, accessed on October 12,2019, http://www.recitequran.com/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/103:1
[2] Michael Sells, Approaching the Quran The Early Revelations (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 2001), 7.
[3] Joseph Lumbard, “What is Quran According to Quran,” accessed October 10, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoT7l67V-qI&t=311s
[4] Joseph Lumbard, Caner Dagli, Maria M Dakake, Seyyid H Nasr, The Study Quran, The Quran in Translation (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015),
[5]Bakarah 277: It is not piety to turn your faces to the east and the west. Rather, piety is he who believes in God, the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets; and who gives wealth, despite loving it (or out of love for God), to kinsfolk, orphans, the indigent, the traveler, beggars…
[6] Muhammad A. Haleem, Exploring the Quran Context and Impact (London-New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 255.
[7] An-Nisa 34: Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance – [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand
[8] Said Nursi, Letters. Letters, 28th Letter, accessed October 9 2009, http://www.erisale.com/index.jsp?locale=en#content.en.202.424
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