How to Read the Qur'an

A New Guide, with Select Translations

Carl W. Ernst

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807869079
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie islamique

For anyone, non-Muslim or Muslim, who wants to know how to approach, read, and understand the text of the Qur'an, How to Read the Qur'an offers a compact introduction and reader's guide. Using a chronological reading of the text according to the conclusions of modern scholarship, Carl W. Ernst offers a nontheological approach that treats the Qur'an as a historical text that unfolded over time, in dialogue with its audience, during the career of the Prophet Muhammad.

1
The History and Form of the Qurʾan and the Practices of Reading

Situating the Qurʾan in History

The Problem of the Historical Understanding of the Qurʾan

The Qurʾan is most frequently approached as a religious text that makes authoritative claims, which are to be either rejected or accepted. Certainly there are religious contexts where such an approach makes sense, whether it be in Muslim circles where reinforcement of Islamic religious teachings is the aim or in non-Muslim religious groups where the message of the Qurʾan is fiercely opposed. Yet there are other ways of approaching the Qurʾan as a literary text embodied in concrete historical situations; it is the argument of this book that situating the Qurʾan in history with literary analysis is the most appropriate method both for the modern university and for the emerging global sphere of public culture.

The historical approach to religion as developed in modern universities, particularly in North America, is a way of addressing religious pluralism without either establishing or rejecting any particular form of religion. The university constitutes a public space in which everyone may take part, and the discussion of religion can be carried out by anyone without having to pay the price of a precommitment to any particular religious persuasion. In the academy, it is no longer acceptable (outside of explicitly religious schools) to quote one particular scriptural position as authoritative and beyond question. The proliferation of multiple religious views in modern society makes such an imposition impractical at best—at worst it is a tyrannical dream. Similarly, in the wider public arena, despite the existence of groups intent on imposing their own sectarian dogmas on society, it is increasingly possible for people to come to a positive appreciation of the religious views of others. Such a positive appreciation differs from the grudging acceptance known as tolerance, which only puts up with hated and distrusted others out of necessity. This is not to prejudge the outcome of a historical and literary reading of the Qurʾan, but it is my observation that many people today have a genuine curiosity to understand the well-springs of the religious beliefs of others. A historical and literary approach at least offers the prospect of a fair-minded and reasonable approach to other people’s religions, which is why such a method seems both attractive and necessary today.

It might be argued that the Qurʾan does not envision the possibility of a nonbeliever understanding the scripture of Islam. Indeed, being a rejecter of God’s message is in effect the definition of disbelief. Qurʾanic rhetoric treats the divine revelation as so transparently true that only willful disobedience could inspire its rejection. In a frequently repeated image, recalling the biblical language of God “hardening the heart” of Pharaoh, the Qurʾan refers to God “putting a seal” on the hearts of unbelievers. “As for the unbelievers, it is the same for them if you warned them or you did not warn them; they do not believe. God has sealed their hearts and their hearing, and upon their sight there is a darkening; theirs is a great punishment” (2:7). At the same time, however, the Qurʾan alludes to the possibility of non-Muslims—in this case, Christian monks—being deeply moved by the recitation of the text: “When they hear what was sent down to the messenger, you will see their eyes overflow with tears from that part of the truth that they recognize” (5:83). Admittedly, the Qurʾan also envisions these monks proclaiming their faith and their status as witnesses of the revelation, so this ends up being a more or less triumphalist statement about the truth of the Qurʾan. But the academic study of religion is necessarily something that stands apart from the endorsement of any particular religious message. What characterizes the academic approach is the application of humanistic and social scientific methodologies to the subject at hand; the scholarly analysis and reframing of a topic is different from the mere replication of its claims to authority.

Yet in another sense the Qurʾan does offer a warrant for non-Muslims needing to understand the revelation. In a very profound sense, the Qurʾan carries with it a recognition of the inevitable pluralism and multiplicity of humankind. “For everyone we have established a law, and a way. If God had wished, He would have made you a single community, but this was so He might test you regarding what He sent you. So try to be first in doing what is best” (5:48). If the existence of multiple religious groups is, as it were, part of the divine plan from a Muslim perspective, what conclusions may be drawn? Either non-Muslims must commit to endless (and ultimately insoluble) conflict with Muslims, or some kind of overlapping consensus or mutual recognition has to be worked out. Like it or not, non-Muslims will have their own perspectives on the Qurʾan and the Islamic tradition, and the Qurʾan does not appear to admit the possibility of the Islamic equivalent of evangelizing all humanity. It seems to me that an academic approach based on history and literature offers an important nontheological alternative to the implacable hostility and prejudice against Islam, which is such a prominent characteristic of the current climate of opinion in America and Europe.

There is, of course, a long history of more or less hostile academic study of Islam by non-Muslims, beginning with medieval theological polemics and transitioning to the modern academic enterprise known as Orientalism. Beginning with the first Latin translation of the Qurʾan, completed in 1143 by Robert of Ketton, European Christian scholars embarked on a project of studying the Qurʾan in order to refute it. The first successful translation of the Qurʾan into English, done by George Sale in 1734, was in turn based on a more extensive Latin translation by an Italian Catholic priest named Louis Maracci (1698), which systematically attempted to disprove the Islamic scripture. While Maracci, ironically, viewed Islam as nearly as bad as Lutheran Protestantism, Sale (a Protestant) was content to dismiss Muhammad with faint praise as a minor lawgiver.

Most European intellectuals, even in the age of the Enlightenment, took it for granted that Muhammad was an impostor and that the Qurʾan was a fabrication. Thomas Carlyle, who strikingly presented a rare positive portrayal of Muhammad in his book On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), gave the following frequently quoted negative review of Sale’s translation of the Qurʾan: “I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement. . . . Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.”¹ It may be asked in passing whether any of Carlyle’s distaste for the Qurʾan was due to the English style of George Sale’s translation, though that would perhaps be unfair. In any case, Carlyle’s jarringly negative verdict on Qurʾan is fairly typical of what even the most open-minded European readers had to say on the subject. What Carlyle objected to was the organization and style of the Qurʾan, which was believed to have been compiled in a haphazard fashion after the death of Muhammad. To his mind, it was not really a book at all. Still, it is noteworthy that Carlyle was aware that the chapters of the Qurʾan were organized roughly by size (with the longest going first), in such a way that the first sections of the text were actually the last to be revealed. “The real beginning of it, in that way, lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest. Read in its historical sequence it perhaps would not be so bad.”² We shall return later to the topic of a chronological reading of the Qurʾan.

In any case, there was a long tradition of religious animosity against the Qurʾan in Christian Europe. This was followed by the disdain of enlightened intellectuals who viewed the Qurʾan as at best a derivative work, definitely inferior to the Bible and to the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity. While there were undoubtedly impressive scholarly contributions in the early European study of Qurʾan, it should nevertheless be taken into account that much of that scholarship on the Qurʾan was negative in its approach.³ In a rather different style defined by the Enlightenment, later Orientalist scholarship on the Qurʾan would be marked to a considerable extent by the ambivalent projection of the Islamic “other,” who was defined in every way as being the opposite of the European.⁴

Nevertheless, new investigations of the historical and literary character of the Qurʾan began to appear in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century. The single most important contribution came from the German scholar Theodor Nöldeke, in his Geschichte des Qorans (History of the Qurʾan), first published in 1860. Nöldeke, a distinguished scholar of Arabic and Persian, built upon suggestions proposed two decades earlier by Gustav Weil to produce a reassessment of the Qurʾan’s traditional chronology, in order to refine with more detail the notion of the Meccan and Medinan phases of the Prophet Muhammad’s career. Nöldeke employed considerations of not only content but also linguistic style and form to divide the Meccan period into three separate phases. Nöldeke’s work was reissued in an expanded form in 1909, supplemented by an additional volume by Friedrich Schwally (1919) on the collection of the Qurʾanic text and a concluding third volume (1938) by G. Bergsträsser and O. Pretzl on the variant readings of the Qurʾan. This fundamental work of European scholarship, which will be discussed further below, is the basis for all modern academic study of the Qurʾan.⁵

In many respects, this historical and literary investigation of the Qurʾan was carried out alongside similar critical researches that European scholars were undertaking in the study of biblical texts. Julius Wellhausen’s historical-critical analysis of the Old Testament (1883) brought to fruition a movement that questioned the traditional notion that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible; he proposed instead the “documentary hypothesis,” according to which these books were actually compiled by different authors many centuries later and retroactively attributed to Moses. Similar revisionist approaches had been proposed for the study of the New Testament and the life of Jesus, culminating notably in Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), which argued that modern authors inevitably projected their own understanding of Jesus in a way that had little to do with the actual historical context of Jesus. It must be acknowledged that such critical studies of the Bible caused dismay and controversy in some religious circles, leading for example to the Catholic Church’s 1907 condemnation of modernism as a heresy. Likewise the birth of Protestant fundamentalism, articulated in the 1910 publication of The Fundamentals, was in good part a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• How to Read the Qur’an
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Charts
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Problem of Reading the Qurʾan
• 1 The History and Form of the Qurʾan and the Practices of Reading
• 2 Early Meccan Suras
• 3 Middle and Later Meccan Suras
• 4 Medinan Suras
• Conclusion Toward a Literary Reading of the Qurʾan
• Appendix A Reading the Structure of the Meccan Suras
• Appendix B Ring Structure in Sura 2 and Sura 5
• Appendix C Suggested Interpretive Exercises
• Notes
• Suggested Reading
• Index of Scriptural Citations
• General Index