Without turning this site into a talking shop for Islamic issues, I want to offer a piece that shows how and why approaching texts with reverant caution has been the norm in Islamic societies. Readers can decide for themselves how this applies to reading Christian mystical texts, or the Zohar, or whatever. But we know, with great certainty, that placing the Qur’ân in the hands of those unqualified to deal with it is one of the irreducible sources of extremist violence in the Islamic world today. And we won’t be far wrong in looking for analogous abuses of the Bible in the equally sick and extremist violence inflicted by the US on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Regarding the proper qualifications of the exegete of the Qur’ân, the great Islamic scholar Imâm an-Nawawî [d. 676/1277] writes:
It is unlawful for someone to explicate the Qur’ân without knowledge and the qualification to speak about its meanings. The hadîths concerning this are many, and there is consensus [ijmâc] on this. It is permissible and fitting that only scholars explicate; there is consensus concerning this as well. When someone qualified to explicate the Qur’ân — one who gathers all the tools through which its meanings are known and the intended meaning is particularly apparent to him — he may indeed explicate it, if it is something attained through independent intellectual reasoning [ijtihâd]. Such matters include the [Book’s] meanings and rulings — the hidden and apparent — what is universal and what is restricted, grammatical inflections, and more.[i]
Clearly this describes qualifications of a very high order. The scholar capable of “independent intellectual reasoning” will be very highly accomplished— and correspondingly rare. It would appear that the passage refers specifically to three important and controversial matters:
- Hidden and apparent meanings seems among other things to allude to a verse of the Qur’ân (al-cImrân, 3: 7) promising that some of its verses are muhkamât, others mutashâbihât. Both the exact meaning of these words, and the assignment of any particular verse to one or the other category, remains in dispute among qualified scholars. A safe and reasonable view might propose that the mutashâbihât are those verses whose meaning is open to conjecture, doubt, and disputation, whereas the muhkamât are not. Imâm an-Nawawî may also have meant to refer to controversies over allegorical interpretation [ta’wîl] of verses, or even the discerning of a verse’s meaning through esoteric allusion [cishâra] as some of the ahl at-tasawwuf propose. Whatever Imâm an-Nawawî intended, it should be clear that many dimensions of both esoteric and exoteric meaning have been discerned for every passage of the Qur’ân, and any truly informed opinion on these matters will necessarily encompass vast scholarly background in the hermeneutical sciences.
- What is universal and what is restricted alludes to categories of rulings [ahkâm] in jurisprudence — in other words, to those judgments that govern the life of the worshipful individual as well as the social relations of the larger community. If, in other words, the Qur’ân promulgates a particular command, are we to understand it as enjoining the behavior of all of humanity, of historical groups now gone, of Muslims generally, of the early community in Medina, of the Prophets, or some other audience again? The designation of verses of the Qur’ân as câmm or khass is just the surface of another vast and fraught hermeneutical effort, not to be entered without both extensive preparation and due reverence — if not outright terror — before the enormity of the task.
- Grammatical inflections alludes to icrâb, meaning the full spectrum of ways in which the basic lexicon of the language is acted upon by the rules of grammar to express meaning through the structure and order of words.
This list is daunting, but also perplexing. The scope of the sciences of the Qur’ân is nearly endless. For those few in every generation who are both capable and willing to engage in interpretive effort with due reverence and humility, the tremendous importance of properly categorizing verses as having meaning that is hidden or apparent, and extension that is universal or restricted, should be obvious enough. But why would one expect that the grammar of the language in which the Qur’ân was revealed to have the same stature? Is its mention in this context by Imâm an-Nawawî really meant to place the study of grammar on the same plane as these other sciences? Is grammar genuinely as important as all that, or was the author simply trying to flesh out a list of prerequisites?
Academic experts on the Qur’ân (by which I mean tenured administrators of academic credit, clerical workers with PhDs, a research program, and a teaching load) may find common cause with Islamic modernists in the claim that the Qur’ân either is, or purports to be, accessible to the non-specialist. For instance, one sees the following claim from a highly esteemed member of the European professoriate [ii]:
The Koran claims for itself that it is mubeen, or clear. But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims — and Orientalists — will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible — if it can’t even be understood in Arabic — then it’s not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not — as even speakers of Arabic will tell you — there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on. [italics original]
It is difficult — faced with a claim like this in a mass-market publication whose sales likely do not wane in proportion to their anti-Islamic content — not to recall one of the categories of the ignorant proposed by Imâm al-Ghazâlî:
The second [type of those afflicted by ignorance] has foolishness as his sickness, and he too is incurable. As Jesus said (upon him be peace), “Verily I was not incapable of bringing the dead to life, but I was incapable of curing the fool.” This is someone who spent a small time in pursuit of learning, studying something [superficially] … so that out of his stupidity he interrogates and queries the great scholar who has passed his life in the intellectual and revealed sciences, and this idiot in his ignorance thinks that what is a problem for him is also problematic for the great scholar. Since he does not know even this much, his questioning is due to his foolishness, and you should not engage in answering him.[iii]
This passage was penned at the dawn of the twelfth century — so already 800 or so years ago the phenomenon of the self-inflated fundamentalist know-nothing know-it-all was well attested. In any case, Imâm an-Nawawî fully anticipates and preemptively demolishes the prospect of this vague something else that must be going on by further clarifying the attributes of the qualified exegete of the Qur’ân. It is, first of all, simply impermissible to offer interpretations of one’s own in the absence of proper preparation and qualification through the most rigorous scholarship. One whose own opinion is not properly informed can only transmit the opinions of those who are qualified.
The concept of transmission is important here. As in other branches of the Islamic sciences, this calls for rigorous authentication of the chain of transmission [isnâd] through which the opinion has passed between the scholar who derived it and the speaker now invoking it. “As for one who is not qualified to offer original explications because of not having attained the scholarly tools,” Imâm an-Nawawî writes, “it is forbidden for him to offer explication.”
What then are these scholarly tools? If the language of the Qur’ân were merely something inconvenient to master, and a transient impediment to the work of real exegesis rather than (as implied above) at the very heart of it, native fluency would logically suffice. Those born in the Arab lands where the language is ambient would have a tremendous natural advantage; passing enough time among such people could, in time, compensate the setback of birth and upbringing elsewhere. To the native speaker, the prescriptive rules, the verb tables, the noun endings — in short, the unpleasantness of the language classroom — would be as second nature, and one could pass directly to the hidden and apparent, the universal and restricted, the substance that is of our investigations.
Not so fast. Imâm an-Nawawî, it would appear, has in mind some other meaning for this concept of grammar than the one we conventionally assume. He writes:
It is not sufficient to simply know Arabic. Rather, one must also know all that qualified scholars of explication have said about a given passage of the Qur’ân, for they may have consensus that the apparent meaning of a verse, for example, is something to be disregarded and that what is intended is a specific or implied meaning, or something else contrary to the obvious. Likewise, if a phrase has different meanings and it is known that one of these meanings is intended, one then explicates each occurrence of the phrase separately.
And all of this depends upon language. Thus, the language of the Qur’ân and its grammar are not separable from the rest of what comprises exegetical effort. Additionally, the model of interpretation taught in the universities of Europe and North America, according to which one stakes a claim to an opinion and then defends it, will not fly here. One does not privilege the singular power of one’s opinion through a celebration of the absolute logical necessity of its narrowness. The goal instead is the mastery and correct representation of comprehensiveness. As Imâm an-Nawawî points out, familiarity with the meanings of the Qur’ân’s Arabic encompasses the following:
- The meaning of a phrase and its grammatical inflections: Arabic word order is much more highly variable than word order in English. Whereas the subject and object of a verb are indicated in English by a position in the sentence that is only seldom flexible, Arabic has no such constraints. Assumptions made on the basis of word order alone, for instance, will lead to many misinterpretations. Meaning in Arabic (i.e., semantics) will be, relative to English, much more dependant on the form of a word (its morphology), and much less dependant on the word-order aspect of its syntax.
- Ellipses, abridgement, and interpolations: In the Qur’ân, it is common to see that something has been omitted, although the omission is obvious from the grammatical structure and its identity can be properly inferred by one trained to do so. The language is often highly compressed, and proper comprehension may depend on the ability to telescope the expression of an idea adequately for our minds to grasp it. Likewise, some passages or arguments appear to be interrupted by an interval in which an apparently unrelated passage or argument is introduced before returning to the original topic. These are matters of the pragmatics of the text (in particular, the communicative intent of Allâh in its composition), as well as of rhetoric, stylistics, figures of speech, elevated usage, and other branches of the study of language barely intuitive to the native speaker.
- Literal and metaphorical meanings: One could proceed by designating passages as metaphorical on the basis of personal taste. What if, for instance, Hellfire were a state of mind rather than a real place that imposes exactly the torments that the Qur’ân describes? Among contemporary people who wish for a more accommodating reading, this prospect holds some appeal. It might also be entirely unwarranted, and it is certainly not (to borrow a term from modern science, even if the concept to which it refers is not in the least bit unfamiliar to the rigorous scholars of Islâm), repeatable. I will designate as non-literal those passages that leave me most ill at ease, and you will likely make a different choice, and in the end relativism and meaninglessness prevail. The way out of this trap is to inquire whether the language itself, properly and deeply understood, provides regular and repeatable clues. Native fluency does not address this in the slightest. Sciences of the Arabic language without precise equivalents in other traditions are instead required, and have been fully developed for centuries.
- Universal and restricted significance: The urgent matter of câmm and khass, already mentioned above, can be resolved through the morphology, syntax, and other domains of the original Arabic expressions. As with literal and metaphorical usage, it is vitally important to individual devotion and the regulation of social relations that these questions be resolved in the most regular and repeatable manner possible — through the language in which universal and restricted significance are originally expressed.
- Ambiguous and detailed aspects: This apparently refers to words or expressions that are considered mutlaq and others that instead are muqayyad. The difference between this and the previous category (universal and restricted) should be immediately perplexing[iv], and this helps prove the basic point: we need to be trained. And even when some way of specifying these differences has been made both clear and consistent, applying such a classification to a text still requires background in the processes of reasoning. Thus, among the Arabic linguistic sciences, mantiq (roughly, Aristotelian or propositional logic) is held to be a vital topic of study.
- Matters of transposition: This refers to muqaddamahu wa-mu’akhkharahu, that is, to aspects of the proper ordering of utterances.
And as if all this is not enough, Imâm an-Nawawî concludes his list with the daunting phrase, “and other things that are not so obvious”. Some of these are enumerated elsewhere[v].
It is not an accident that the Qur’ân refers to itself as “a Qur’ân in Arabic” — inimitable and untranslatable. It must be approached through its original expression, and using the tools of a complex and extensive apparatus of linguistics. The alternative — an overly democratized text, subject to the bizarre doctrine of sola scriptura — is, in fact, at the heart of much of today’s religious violence. The extremism of al-Qaeda and their ilk is the extremism of rejection of traditional scholarship — an Islamic fundamentalism that is, in effect, a fully modernist Islamic Reformation. Liberating texts has its risks.
[i] This and subsequent passages of Imâm an-Nawawî’s discussion are taken, with slight modification, from Musa Furber’s translation of al-Tibyân fî âdâb hamalat al-Qur’ân (Etiquette with the Qur’ân, Starlatch Press, 2003, pp. 99-100).
[ii] Namely, one Gerd-R. Puin, “a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany”, quoted by Toby Lester in “What is the Koran?” (Atlantic Monthly, vol. 283, no. 1, 1999). Please note in the subsequent discussion and enumeration of the traditional sciences of the Arabic language that neither Arabic calligraphy nor “Koranic paleography” finds mention, the former because its domain is not hermeneutical, and the latter for its self-evident irrelevance both to our topic and, frankly, to Dr. Puin’s.
[iii] Imâm al-Ghazâlî, Letter to a Disciple [Ayyuhâ’l-Walad] (Islamic Texts Society, 2005, p. 46).
[iv] A very compressed explanation of one way (among others) in which such terms can be thought to differ is given by Mohammad Hashim Kamali (Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, 3d edition, Islamic Texts Society, 2003, p. 155) as follows:
Mutlaq denotes a word which is neither qualified nor limited in its application. When we say, for example, a “book”, a “bird”, or a “man”, each one is a generic noun which applies to any book, bird, or man, without any restriction. In its original state, the mutlaq is unspecified and unqualified. The mutlaq differs from the camm, however, in that the latter includes all to which it applies, whereas the former can apply to any one of a multitude, but not to all.
[v] For instance, see an entire book published in English on aspects of the classification of utterances: Sukrija Husejn Ramic, Language and the Interpretation of Islamic Law (Islamic Texts Society, 2003).
