General
From Issue: 455 [Read full issue]
| Living the Quran |
Al-Baqarah
(The Cow)
This may have well been directed at the Jews of Madinah on certain specific occasions, but it applies to all believers and religious leaders of all groups and generations. When religioius teaching becomes a mere "profession" it loses its fervour; those who take it up begin to say things they do not believe and their actions tend to become divorced from their words. This can lead them to twist facts and compromise ideas and principles to serve their interests and desires. Their rulings, pronouncements and opinions, or fatwas, may sound convincing but they are far removed from the spirit and the letter of the religion. The double standards of those who claim to represent a certain religion or ideology not only harm them personally, but also undermine the ideas and the religions they are advocating. They confuse people and weaken their trust and confidence in the religion, so that they lose interest in it. When people lose trust in their preachers, the preachers become even more diffident and arrogant. When they are not uttered with sincerity and conviction, words lose their impact. A man's beliefs are meaningless unless his actions and behaviour become a practical translation of those beliefs. When a man's conduct reflects his words, no matter how plain and ordinary these words are, people will trust him and take him seriously. His words draw their power and effect from the sincerity and honesty with which they are being uttered, not from the rhetoric or eloquence in which they are delivered. They assume a force of their own. Source: |
| Understanding the Prophet's Life |
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Enjoying Prayer The reward recorded is in proportion to the degree of khushoo, as the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: “A slave may pray and have nothing recorded for it except a tenth of it, or a ninth, or an eighth, or a seventh, or a sixth, or a fifth, or a quarter, or a third, or a half.” (Reported by Imaam Ahmad; Saheeh al-Jaami, 1626) The one who prays with khushoo will feel lighter when he finishes his prayer, as if his burdens have been lifted from him. He will feel at ease and refreshed, so that he will wish he had not stopped praying, because it is such a source of joy and comfort for him in this world. He will keep feeling that he is in a constricting prison until he starts to pray again; he will find comfort in prayer instead of wanting just to get it over and done with. Those who love prayer say: we pray and find comfort in our prayer, just as their leader, example and Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said, “O Bilaal, let us find comfort in prayer.” He did not say “Let us get it over and done with.” The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said, “My joy has been made in prayer.” So whoever finds his joy in prayer, how can he bear to look for joy anywhere else, or to keep away from it? Source: |
| Blindspot! |
Radical Reform At the heart of the Islamic creed (al-`aqîdah), among the six pillars of faith (arkân al-imân), lies the recognition of revealed books and the faith and belief that the Quran, the last Revelation, is the word of God (kalâm Allah) revealed to mankind as such in clear Arabic language (“lisânun `arabiyyun mubîn”). To the believing conscience, this is one of the pillars of faith and any reform questioning one of the fundamentals of the creed, of the `aqîdah, could not be accepted, heard nor promoted by the Muslim faithful. It might be attractive to the restricted circles of rationalists, but it will always be perceived as (at best) out of place, or more clearly as a betrayal of Islamic teachings, by the bulk of believers (whether practising or not, actually). Indeed, this “excess of rationalism” on the part of some early or contemporary thinkers has often led to simply disqualifying the notion of “reform” altogether, since it was perceived as dangerous because it undermined the principles of the Muslim faith or was imported from the Christian universe of reference. People tend to believe that dogmatic or literalist approaches are caused by the nature of the Quranic text, and that ascribing a human origin to it would suffice to open the way to a historical and contextualised reading. However, this statement performs two dangerous shortcuts. The first one consists in assuming that the status of the text alone determines its readers’ mode of interpretation, while this is far from obvious or inevitable. The history of religions and ideologies is filled with examples of texts produced by guides or thinkers, which have been, and still are, read dogmatically by their adepts or followers. The status of the text can indeed influence the modalities of reading, but in the end, it is the mind and psyche of the reader interpreting it that projects its categories and the modalities of its interpretation onto the book. Up to very recent times, Marx’s works were sometimes read and interpreted in most dogmatic terms by most atheistic Marxists. A text’s human source by no means warrants a historicizing reading of its contents, and numerous Christian trends, while recognising the various historical strata of the Gospels’ elaboration, still advocate a literal reading of the New Testament. What must be assessed and questioned is often the outlook, psychological set-up and frame of reference of interpreting scholars, and the debate over the status of the text falls far short of resolving the issue of historical and contextualised interpretation. The other shortcut is methodologically more serious and its consequences are far more harmful. It consists in exporting the experience of Catholic theology into the Islamic tradition: since the historical-critical approach was only possible, in the Christian tradition, once the human source of the New Testament had been acknowledged, it is assumed to be the same – by natural induction – for the Islamic legal tradition. However, this exogenous, imported outlook fails to do justice to the great legal tradition of Islam that has never, since the beginning, linked the status of the Quran (as the “eternal word of God” ) to the impossibility of historical and contextualised interpretation. Indeed, quite the contrary has occurred. From the outset, the Prophet’s companions (as-sahâba), the following generation (at-tâbi`ûn), then the scholars, the leading figures of the various sciences and schools of law, kept referring to the context, causes (asbâb) and chronology of revealed verses. The sciences and commentaries of the Quran (`ulûm al-Qur’ân and at-tafâsîr), the study of the Prophet’s life (as-sîra), the classification of prophetic traditions (`ulûm al-hadîth) are so many areas of study that were constituted while taking into account the historicality of the revealed Word as well as of the Prophet’s speech and action. The eternal Word of God was revealed within a specific history, over twenty-three years, and if some texts or injunctions transcend the human History that receives them, some other verses cannot be understood without being inserted within a particular time sequence. Then, human intelligence alone can determine the contents of the timeless principle drawn from the text, while necessarily taking into account its relation to the social and historical context of its enunciation. This critical approach has been known and acknowledged since the beginning by all schools of law. Source: |
