by Reza Aslan
A WONDERFUL STORY is told about the conversion of the Caliph Umar to Islam. Umar’s fierce pride in his pagan ancestry and his tribal heritage initially led him to lash out violently against Muhammad and his followers. In fact, Umar had at one time planned to murder Muhammad in order to put an end to his disruptive movement. But as he was on his way to find the Prophet, a friend informed him that his own sister had accepted the new religion and was, at that moment, meeting with one of the believers in her home. Furious, Umar drew his sword and rushed to her house, determined to kill her for betraying their family and tribe. Before he could enter, however, he heard the sacred words of the Quran recited from within. The power and elegance of the recitation fixed him to the spot. He dropped his sword.
“How fine and noble is this speech!” he declared, his eyes filling with tears. And like Saul of Tarsus, who was struck blind by the vision of Jesus admonishing him to stop his persecution of the Christians, Umar was transformed by divine intervention: not because he saw God, but because he heard God.
It has been said that the medium through which humanity experiences “the miraculous” can alter dramatically according to time and place. In the age of Moses, for example, miracle was primarily experienced through magic. Moses was forced to prove his prophetic credentials by transforming a rod into a snake or, more spectacularly, by parting the Red Sea. By the time of Jesus, the experience of miracle had, for the most part, shifted to the field of medicine, which also included exorcism. The disciples may have believed Jesus to be the promised Messiah, but there is little doubt that the rest of Judea saw him as merely another wandering healer; almost everywhere Jesus went he was constantly challenged to demonstrate his prophetic identity, not by performing magical feats, but by healing the sick and the lame.
In Muhammad’s time, the medium through which miracle was primarily experienced was neither magic nor medicine, but language. Predominantly oral societies like Muhammad’s often viewed words as being infused with mystical power. The ancient Greek bard who sang of Odysseus’ wanderings and the Indian poet who chanted the sacred verses of the Ramayana were more than mere storytellers; they were the mouthpieces of the gods. When at the start of each new year the Native American shaman recounts his tribe’s creation myths, his words not only recall the past, they fashion the future. Communities that do not rely on written records tend to believe that the world is continuously re-created through their myths and rituals. In these societies, poets and bards are often priests and shamans; and poetry, as the artful manipulation of the common language, is thought to possess the divine authority necessary to express fundamental truths.
This was particularly true in pre-Islamic Arabia, where poets had an extraordinarily elevated status in society. As Michael Sells documents in Desert Tracings, at the start of each pilgrimage season, ancient Mecca’s best poets had their verses embroidered in gold on expensive Egyptian cloth banners and suspended from the Ka‘ba, not because their odes were of a religious nature (they were most often about the beauty and majesty of the poet’s camel!), but because they possessed an intrinsic power that was naturally associated with the Divine. It was this same intrinsic divinity of words that led the Kahins to present their oracular pronouncements through poetry: it would have been inconceivable for the gods to speak in any other way.
Obviously, it is difficult for non-Arabic speakers to appreciate the exquisite quality of the Quran’s language. But it may be sufficient to note that the Quran is widely recognized as the Arabic language at its poetic height. Indeed, in codifying the idiom and dialect of the Hijaz, the Quran essentially created the Arabic language. As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time.
As “the supreme Arab event,” to quote Kenneth Cragg, the Quran is regarded by most Muslims as Muhammad’s sole miracle. Like the prophets who came before him, Muhammad was repeatedly urged to prove his divine mission through miraculous acts. But whenever he was challenged in this way, he insisted that he was nothing more than a messenger, and his message was the only miracle he had to offer. And unlike the miracles of other prophets, which are confined to a particular age, Muhammad’s miracle of the Quran would, in the words of the twelfth-century mystic Nadjm ad-Din Razi Daya (1177–1256), “remain until the end of the world.”
Daya was appealing to a fundamental belief in Islam that in both speech and form, the Quran is incomparable to any other religious or secular writing the world has seen. Muhammad himself often challenged the pagan poets of his time to match the splendor of the Quran, saying, “If you are in doubt of what we have revealed … then bring [a verse] like it. But if you cannot—and indeed you cannot—then guard yourself against the Fire, whose fuel is men and stones” (2:23–24; also 16:101).
While the concept of the Umm al-Kitab (“the Mother of Books”) means that the Quran is spiritually connected to other sacred scriptures, unlike the Torah and the Gospels—both of which consist of individual books written by many different writers over hundreds of years, conveying the experience of encountering the Divine in history—the Quran is considered to be direct revelation (tanzil), the actual words of God handed down through Muhammad, who was little more than a passive conduit. In purely literary terms, the Quran is God’s dramatic monologue. It does not recount God’s communion with humanity; it is God’s communion with humanity. It does not reveal God’s will; it reveals God’s self. And if the doctrine of tawhid forbids any division in the Divine Unity, then the Quran is not just the Speech of God, it is God.
This was precisely what the Traditionalist Ulama argued. If God is eternal, then so are the divine attributes, which cannot be separated from God’s self. This would make the Quran, as God’s Speech, an eternal and uncreated thing. The Rationalist Ulama considered this to be an unreasonable point of view that would lead to a number of unsolvable theological problems (Does God speak Arabic? Is every copy of the Quran a copy of God?). The Rationalists argued instead that God’s Speech reflects God but is not itself God.
Some members of the Ulama, such as Abu Hanifa, tried to bridge the debate between the Rationalists and Traditionalists by claiming that “our utterance of the Quran is created, our writing of it is created, our reciting of it is created, but the Quran [itself] is uncreated.” Ibn Kullab (d. 855) agreed, arguing that the Traditionalists were right to consider the word of God as “one single thing in God,” but only insofar as it is not made up of physical letters and words. Ibn Kullab’s view was refined by Ibn Hazm (994–1064), who posited the existence of a “pre-revealed” Quran (as implied by the concept of Umm al-Kitab) in which “what is in the pages of the book is … an imitation of the [physical] Quran.” Once again, however, it was the influential Ahmad ibn Hanbal who solidified the Traditionalist doctrine by claiming that what a Muslim reads between the physical covers of the Quran—its every word and letter—is itself the actual word of God: eternal and uncreated.
The debate between the Rationalist and the Traditionalist Ulama continued for a few hundred years, with each school alternating in influence, until the end of the thirteenth century, when, partly in response to al-Ma’mun’s disastrous Inquisition, the Traditionalist position became the dominant position in Sunni Islam. Most Rationalists were branded as heretics, and their theories gradually lost influence in all the major schools of law and theology with the exception of the Shi‘ite schools (discussed in the following chapter). And while the debate over the nature of the Quran continues to this day, the influence of the Traditionalist interpretation has led to a number of extraordinary theological and legal developments in Islam.
For instance, belief in the eternal, uncreated word of God has led to the widespread conviction among Muslims that the Quran cannot be translated from its original language. A translation into any other language would remove the direct speech of God, rendering it an interpretation of the
Quran, not the Quran itself. As Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula to the rest of the world, every convert—whether Arab, Persian, European, African, or Indian—had to learn the Arabic language in order to read Islam’s sacred text. Even today, Muslims of every culture and ethnicity must read the Quran in Arabic, whether they understand it or not. The message of the Quran is vital to living a proper life as a Muslim, but it is the words themselves—the actual speech of the one and only God—that possess a spiritual power known as baraka.
While baraka can be experienced in a number of ways, it is most vividly encountered through Islam’s unrivaled tradition of calligraphy. Partly because of the primacy of the word in Islam, and partly because of the religion’s aversion to iconolatry and thus the figural arts, calligraphy has become the supreme artistic expression in the Muslim world. Yet Islamic calligraphy is more than just an art form; it is the visual representation of the eternal Quran, the symbol of God’s living presence on earth.
The words of the Quran are inscribed on mosques, tombs, and prayer rugs in order to sanctify them. They are emblazoned on common objects like cups, bowls, and lamps, so that when one eats from a plate adorned with God’s Speech, or lights a lamp with a Quranic verse etched into it, one is able to consume baraka, to be illuminated by it. In the same way that pre-Islamic poetry was thought to convey divine authority, so do the words of the Quran act as a talisman that transmits divine power. It is no wonder, then, that after the Ka‘ba had been cleansed and rededicated, the pagan odes that had hung from the sanctuary were torn down and replaced by verses from the Quran, which still form a golden band around the sacred shrine.
Another way in which Muslims experience baraka is through the art, or rather the science, of Quranic recitation. As William Graham has observed, the early Muslim community undoubtedly understood the Quran to be an oral scripture that was intended to be spoken aloud in a community, not read quietly to oneself. Recall that the word “Quran” literally means “recitation,” which is why so many passages begin with the command qul, or “say.”
The early efforts of the Qurra, or Quran readers, to memorize and preserve the sacred scripture eventually led to the creation of a technical science of Quranic recitation called tajwid, with strict rules regulating when one is permitted to stop during a recitation and when it is forbidden to stop, when to prostrate oneself and when to rise, when to breathe and when not to take breath, which consonants to stress and how long to hold each vowel. Because Islam has traditionally been suspicious of the use of music in worship, for fear of compromising the divine nature of the text, a recitation can never be outright musical. However, the use of spontaneous melody is encouraged, and some contemporary Quranic reciters exhibit an extraordinary degree of musical virtuosity. Their recitals are akin to rock concerts at which thousands of boisterous listeners are encouraged to respond to the recitation by shouting their reactions—whether positive or negative—at the performer on stage.
But it would not be entirely correct to call these recitations “concerts,” or even “performances.” These are spiritual gatherings at which the reciter transmits the baraka of God’s word to what is, in essence, a congregation. Because while the Quran may be God’s dramatic monologue, when read aloud, it is miraculously transformed into a dialogue between the Creator and Creation, a dialogue in which God is physically present.
By far the most significant development of the Traditionalist position regarding the eternal Quran can be observed in the science of Quranic exegesis. From the start, Muslims had an inordinately difficult time interpreting the meaning and message of the Quran. As the direct speech of God, the Quran was recorded without interpretation or commentary, with little concern for chronology and almost no narrative. To assist them in their exegesis, the early Ulama divided the Revelation into two distinct periods—those verses revealed in Mecca and those revealed in Medina—thereby creating a loose chronology that helped clarify their interpretation of the text.
However, for the neophyte, the organization of the Quran can be baffling. The text that Uthman collected is divided into 114 chapters called Surahs, each containing a different number of verses or ayahs. With few exceptions, every Surah begins with the invocation of the Basmallah: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.” Perhaps to emphasize the Quran’s status as direct revelation, the Surahs are arranged neither chronologically nor thematically, but rather from the longest chapter to the shortest, the lone exception being the first and most important chapter, Surah al-Fatiha: the “Opening.”
There are two distinct methods of interpreting the Quran. The first, tafsir, is primarily concerned with elucidating the literal meaning of the text, while the second, ta’wil, is more concerned with the hidden, esoteric meaning of the Quran. Tafsir answers questions of context and chronology, providing an easily understandable framework for Muslims to live a righteous life. Ta’wil delves into the concealed message of the text, which, because of its mystical nature, is comprehensible only to a select few. While both are considered equally valid approaches, the tension between tafsir and ta’wil is but one of the inevitable consequences of trying to interpret an eternal and uncreated scripture that is nevertheless firmly grounded in a specific historical context.
For the Rationalists, who rejected the notion of an uncreated Quran, the only reasonable method of exegesis was one that accounted for the temporal nature of the Revelation. For this reason, the Rationalists stressed the primacy of human reason in determining not just the essence of the Quran, but also its meaning and, most importantly, its historical context. To the Traditionalists, the eternal and uncreated nature of the Quran made it pointless to talk of historical context or original intent when interpreting it. The Quran has never changed and will never change; neither should its interpretation.
As one can imagine, the Traditionalist position had a profound influence on Quranic exegesis. First, it provided the orthodox Ulama with sole authority to interpret what was now widely considered to be a fixed and immutable text revealing the divine will of God. Second, because the eternal, uncreated Quran could not possibly be considered a product of Muhammad’s society, historical context could not play any role in its interpretation. What was appropriate for Muhammad’s community in the seventh century C.E. must be appropriate for all Muslim communities to come, regardless of the circumstances. This view of the Quran as static and unchanging became increasingly problematic as the Revelation gradually transformed from merely the principle of moral guidance in the Muslim community to the primary source of Islam’s Sacred Law: the Shariah.
CALLED “THE CORE and kernel of Islam” by Joseph Schacht, the Shariah was developed by the Ulama as the basis for the judgment of all actions in Islam as good or bad, to be rewarded or punished. More specifically, the Shariah recognizes five categories of behavior:
1) actions that are obligatory, in that their performance is rewarded and their omission punished;
2) actions that are meritorious, in that their performance may be rewarded, but their neglect is not punished;
3) actions that are neutral and indifferent;
4) actions that are considered reprehensible, though not necessarily punished; and
5) actions that are forbidden and punished.
These five categories are designed to demonstrate Islam’s overarching concern with not only forbidding vice, but also actively promoting virtue.
As a comprehensive body of rules guiding the life of all Muslims, the Shariah is divided into two categories: regulations regarding religious duties, including the proper method of worship; and regulations of a purely juridical nature (though the two often overlap). In either case, the Shariah is meant to regulate only one’s external actions; it has little to do with inner spirituality. As a result, those believers who subscribe to Islam’s mystical traditions (the Sufis) tend to regard the Shariah as merely the starting point of righteousness; true faith, they say, requires moving beyond the law.
The moral provisions
of the Shariah are made concrete through the discipline of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, of which the Quran is its first and most important source. The problem, however, is that the Quran is not a book of laws. While there are some eighty or so verses that deal directly with legal issues—matters like inheritance and the status of women, in addition to a handful of penal prescriptions—the Quran makes no attempt whatsoever to establish a system of laws regulating the external behavior of the community, as the Torah does for the Jews. Thus, when dealing with the countless legal issues on which the Quran is silent, the Ulama turn to the traditions, or Sunna, of the Prophet.
The Sunna is composed of thousands upon thousands of stories, or hadith, that claim to recount Muhammad’s words and deeds, as well as those of the earliest Companions. As discussed in Chapter 3, as these hadith were passed down from generation to generation, they became increasingly convoluted and inauthentic, so that after a while, nearly every legal or religious opinion—no matter how radical or eccentric—could be legitimated by the Prophet’s authority. By the ninth century, the situation had gotten so out of hand that a group of legal scholars, working independently of one another, attempted to catalogue the most reliable hadith into authoritative collections, the most respected of which are the canons of Muhammad al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875).
The primary criterion by which these collections were authenticated was the chain of transmission, or isnad, that often accompanied each hadith. Those hadith whose isnad could be traced to an early and reliable source were considered “sound” and accepted as authentic, while those that could not were considered “weak” and rejected. One major problem with this method, however, is that before the ninth century, when the collections were completed, a proper and complete isnad was by no means an essential element in the dissemination of a hadith. Joseph Schacht’s extensive research on the development of the Shariah has shown how quite a large number of widely acknowledged hadith had their chains of transmission added conjecturally so as to make them appear more authentic. Hence Schacht’s whimsical but accurate maxim: “the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.”
