Book review: 'Reading The Quran'

Reading The Quran: The Contemporary Relevance Of The Sacred Text of Islam
Ziauddin Sardar
Hachette
406 pages
Rs550

The tragic incidents of 9/11 saw a dramatic rise in public interest in one of the most read books of all time, the Quran, with sales skyrocketing across the globe. Obviously, there was a desperate rush to know if the holy book indeed justified the kind of violence that Muslim extremist organisations have come to symbolise today.

It is not that the Quran was not subjected to such an enquiry before 9/11. The attack on New York only exacerbated this probe, much to the discomfort of the Muslim world. And Reading The Quran is just the prescription for anyone willing to embark on an interpretative journey with Ziauddin Sardar into the heart of the locus classicus of Islam, to find out what control it exercises over the Muslim mind.

Sardar’s analytical expedition traverses a wide swath of semantic territory to pierce the veils of “assumptions and received opinions” shrouding the Quran, and unravel the contemporary relevance of its universal message. According to Sardar, the Quran is neither a digest of science nor a compendium of legal codes as some dubious intellectuals and clerics would have us believe. It is a book of guidance which urges its readers to think, ponder and reflect beyond “binary logic.”

Therefore, the only way of understanding the Quran is to adopt a multi-dimensional approach in relating its text to all aspects of life rather than reducing it to a simplistic list of dos and don’ts. In other words, Sardar is telling us that one can understand the Quran better by being a thinker than an expert in Arabic. His contention is that knowledge of Arabic alone is not sufficient to comprehend the meaning of the Sacred Text because, proficiency in Quranic and classical Arabic did not prevent the late Saudi Mufti Bin Baz from declaring that the earth was flat and that the Sun went around it. 

Sardar also laments that translational interpolations by the Wahabi orthodoxy have turned the Quran into “a blueprint for replicating the xenophobic and misogynist Saudi society in every detail.” As an example of this, he cites the Saudi-authorised translation The Noble Qur’an by Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan, which explains the word fitna in 2:91 as polytheism and apostasy, suggesting that those guilty of either of these crimes should be fought “until there is no more disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah.”

Sardar clarifies that fitna actually means “social disruption or temptation to sin” and cannot be translated (as Hilali and Khan have done) to question the very existence of non-Muslims in a Muslim society. For the same reasons, Sardar censures NJ Dawood’s ‘Penguin Classic’ The Koran. Its obscurantist imagery, he says, comes in handy for Islamophobes who accuse Muslims and their religion of fanaticism, violence and depravity.

On science, even while pronouncing as utterly misplaced the accusations that Islam is “anti-progressive” and ‘anti-science”, Sardar critcises attempts by some intellectuals to read scientific facts and theories into the poetic and allegorical verses of the Quran. He reserves his severest criticism for the Turkish author Adnan Oktar aka Haroon Yahya — for promoting conspiracy theories and religious paranoia through his creationist literature in the name of disproving the theory of evolution.

The Quran, says Sardar, gives immense importance to the pursuit of knowledge by pointing out “methods for doing science”, such as its emphasis on the importance of observation and the significance of measurement and calculation. But all this is done in an allegorical way and it would be foolish to adopt a literalist approach to understand such verses. In this context, Sardar says that the idea of Intelligent Design is based on a literalist reading of the Biblical text and there is nothing in the Quranic narratives that goes against the concept of evolution. Creationism has never been a Muslim position in history and Islamic societies have not witnessed raging debates on Darwinism as seen among the Christians. Therefore, Sardar expects that Muslims should have no problem in accepting the compatibility of Quran and evolution, particularly when it was not a problem in their history.

Reading The Quran is also an important contribution to the cause of Muslim feminism.  It dissects misogynist interpretations of Islam, and proves that women enjoy rights on a par with men as per the Quran and that domestic violence, triple talaq and polygamy find no sanction in the Muslim Sacred Text. Of particular interest to women would be Sardar’s explanation of terms such as dharaba, qawwam, hijab and also his rendering of “menstruation” as “a vulnerable condition” rather than the problematic “illness” and “pollution” as done by majority of commentators. In short, Reading The Quran is an intrepid attempt to force open the doors of ijtihad (independent thinking) which were slammed shut centuries ago by the conservative Muslim clergy. It is a must read for anyone interested in liberating Islam from the “weight of tradition and classical commentaries” that seek to discourage Muslims from opening their minds to new knowledge.
 

The reviewer is the secretary-general of the
Chennai-based Forum for the Promotion of
Moderate Thought among Muslims