first emerged as a threat to what had been the traditional mode of authority, it became established as a “traditional” method in its own right, since the knowledge of words’ precise meanings promised to push out the reader’s personal subjectivity and restrain oneself within the words. For those who placed confidence in the exact wording of the Qur’n as the means of establishing and regulating truth, the systematic study of Arabic became a prerequisite to authority.
The tradition-innovation binary loses more power here. To preserve tradition means first deciding what counts as tradition and therefore requires the work of preservation, then clarifying what had been left vague or open to dispute, sealing closed any cracks and fissures, adapting to new technologies and fields of knowledge, and redrawing boundaries. To properly shelter the tradition requires more stability than the tradition had ever secured on its own. The refined tradition ends up more guarded from misreadings, and thus narrower in its possibilities, than it could have been without these innovative interventions. After such a process, can it be the same tradition that it had been before getting marked as “tradition”? Even if every letter was preserved exactly as the first Companions received it from Muammad, the process by which Muslims protected the Qur’n from change inevitably changed the Qur’n. The revelation bound in book form strikes me as a memorial to the lost.
Popular Muslim history suggests that Muammad was illiterate, an intellectual virgin. His lack of education presents the textual Qur’n as a miracle, like Mary becoming pregnant without a man’s intervention. Muammad was all shaman, no scientist, no critical theorist. Revelation came to him like the ringing of a bell and made him sweat even in the cold, but he left us with these words that we pick over and throw at each other in rational debates.
Muhammad said that scholars were heirs to the prophets; at least the scholars tell us so. Funny how that works.
For scholars to actualize the role that Muammad had reportedly assigned them, Muammad must be absent; they can’t inherit from a living prophet who still speaks. I don’t know exactly what it meant to be a “scholar” in his time, but it’s only after the death of Muammad, and with his death the guarantee of prophethood’s closure, that the Qur’n can become an intellectual project, the domain of scholars. If theology is what happens when the intellect negotiates with a scripture, theologians can say nothing to prophets. Theology might claim submission to text but really conquers, keeping the words intact but still assuming control over them. The Qur’n was Allh giving humanity his Qul, the command, “Say”—an imperative that occurs some three hundred times in the text. Every interpreter reverses the Qur’n’s flow of power, telling Allh not what to say, but rather what to mean when he speaks. This cannot be helped by calling your reading “literal.” Reading is writing, every time.
Even as the Qur’n successfully repeats itself, speaking to times and places beyond its first audience, a text’s repeatability in part depends on the potential for its old words to produce new results. A verse remains powerful not because it imposes its meaning on the future, but because it accommodates the future’s needs: The verse is not bound to its author or its first audience. While the Qur’n’s references point to what’s outside itself, the outside also pours in. Ideas that did not exist for the earliest Muslim community sneak into the Qur’n, find homes for themselves in the words, and give the appearance of having always been there. One such idea might have been the notion of human souls. Does the Qur’n espouse belief in a soul that exists independently of our bodies? We tend to assume that it does, since the Qur’n speaks of resurrection and we have been trained to think about resurrection in terms of souls. The text of the Qur’n, however, consistently speaks of the afterlife in terms of Allh’s power to reassemble and revive the material body, even after the body has turned into dust; it does not explicitly argue that an immaterial aspect of every person will outlast her physical matter. The word that we now take for granted as equivalent to “soul,” nafs, is used in numerous ways in the Qur’n, typically in relation to selfhood—not only Allh,
first emerged as a threat to what had been the traditional mode of authority, it became established as a “traditional” method in its own right, since the knowledge of words’ precise meanings promised to push out the reader’s personal subjectivity and restrain oneself within the words. For those who placed confidence in the exact wording of the Qur’