How to Read the Quran –Carl W Ernst – Edinburgh University Press – 2012
Carl Ernst theorises based on a literary approach
underpinned by a non supernatural foundation so it’s important to note this if
you come across anything he says which goes against the traditional Islamic
narrative. Ernst uses a chronological,
literary and historical approach – which is a post orientalist and cosmopolitan
approach. Literary investigation includes structural composition and principal
themes of suras.
He’s not doing
devotional reading nor is he reading the Quran in the way a Muslim would thus he will say things which are not in line with Islamic thought. Be wary of this.
However he does make some points which may be of interest for Muslim
apologetics, some of which I will share here.
Unfair treatment of
Islam and the Quran by hostile readers (this would include Islamophobes and
Christian missionaries)
“Hostile readers of the Quran use a literary approach that
is the equivalent of a blunt instrument. They make no attempt to understand the
text as a whole; instead, they take individual verses out of context, give them
the most extreme interpretation possible and implicitly claim that over 1
billion Muslims around the world robotically adhere to these extremist views
without exception. This is, in effect, a conspiracy theory that has virally
multiplied in significant sectors of modern Euro-American society. It is
irrational, it is paranoid, and it is out of touch with the realities of the
lives of most Muslims around the world today. It ignores the existence of
multiple traditions of interpreting the Quran in very different fashions.
Unfortunately, a small minority of extremists, who quote the Quran in support
of terrorist violence, have been magnified by the media into a spectre that is
now haunting Europe (and the United States) more intensely than Marxism ever
did. In part because of these contemporary anxieties, it is difficult for most
Europeans and Americans to read the Quran” 2
“Muslims are all too familiar with condescending Christian
missionaries who propose to tell them what the Quran should actually mean” 210
“Most European intellectuals, even at the time of the
Enlightenment, took it for granted that Mohammad was an impostor and the Quran
a fabrication and a derivative work. There was theological prejudice and
negativity in earlier studies of the Quran. “
Reliability and
Revisionist Theories
“In comparison with the Bible, the Quran exhibits much
greater textual stability, and variant readings found in different manuscripts
are largely trivial in pronunciation or vocabulary. A number of theories have been advanced in
recent years by European writers, questioning the traditional account of its
composition. Some have proposed that the Quran was actually assembled as long
as two centuries after the time of Prophet Muhammad. This hypothetical argument
has not gained much traction, because of a lack of supporting evidence. Other
more bizarre theories have been advanced, claiming that the Quran is really
based on Christian text, or that it is not written in Arabic at all, but in a
form of Syrian that is badly understood. Scholars of biblical studies (and
readers of The Da Vinci Code) are certainly familiar with breathless exposes
that claim to overturn all of the history of Christianity. This kind of radical
revisionism probably gets more of a hearing when it concerns Islam, in part
because most people are less familiar with the subject, but also because of
fantasy expectations about debunking the Quran, otherwise it is hard to
understand why such eccentric publications would be featured on the front page
of the New York Times”. 4
“The Quran is the source of enormous anxiety in Europe and
America, for both religious conservatives, who are alarmed about a competitive
postbiblical revelation...” 1
“In practice today, a single reading (that of Hafs via Asim)
is predominant, because of the widespread acceptance of the 1924 printing of
the Quran by the Egyptian government using that standard, though other readings
are occasionally available in print or audio recordings. In general, it is
widely assumed that the text of the Quran has remained remarkably stable and
that it has been more or less free from scribal insertions of the kind that
crept into the manuscripts of the New Testament.”29
Arabic language
“When one turns to the nature of the assembled Quranic text
, the first point to be addressed is the character of the Arabic language and
the script in which it is couched. Arabic is considered a West Semitic
language, and it belongs to the family of languages with alphabetic scripts
(such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Ethiopic), which all ultimately descend from
ancient Phoenician. Old written forms of the Arabic language are found in rock
inscriptions throughout the Arabian Peninsula, which employ several different
scripts ultimately derived from South Arabia. Arabic speakers also used the
Nabatean script from the second century BCE, notably in the city of Petra (in
modern Jordan), and that became the basis for the distinctive Arabic script
that emerged in Syria and northwest Arabia in the sixth century CE, sometimes in
multilingual inscriptions that included Greek or Syriac.” 26-26
Some notable revolutionary
approaches and the media
“But the most revolutionary approach to the Quran in recent
scholarship came in the work of John Wansbrough, a literary specialist, who
argued that the text of the Quran could not have been compiledin the present
from, as the traditional account has it, shortly after the death of the Prophet
Muhammad. He proposed that the oral sayings on which the Quran is based were in
circulation for as much as a couple of centuries before they were assembled as
a book. The codification of the Quran, in his view, was part of a larger historical
process in which an originally Jewish-Christian religious movement outside of
Arabia eventually turned into an Arab-Islamic polity, which then retrospectively
created a fictional account of its origins n Arabia. Wansbrough’s revisionist work was an extremely learned and
complicated argument, and unsupported by direct external historical evidence. Parallel
revisionist studies also emeerged at the
same time in the area of early Islamic history, in which Patricia Crone and
Michael Cook argued that Muslim sources were completely unreliable and that
therefore one can only reconstruct the early history of Islam through foreign
sources. A couple of even more radical studies then appeared, which maintained that
the text of the Quran was originally a Christian work later revised along
Islamic lines (G. Lulling) or that it was originally written in Syriac and then
completely misunderstood as an Arabic text (Christopher Luxenberg, a pseudonym).
Both of these authors took the bold (and highly questionable) step of making
significant alterations in the Arabic text of the Quran in order to make it fit
their arguments. In literary terms, these later efforts overstate their case,
by calling for the rejection of over a millennium of textual history and
proposing completely new explanations previously unsuspected by anyone else.
From a quite different perspective, John Burton also challenged the traditional
account of the Quran, arguing that it was fully completed during the life of
the Prophet. It is remarkable that all these revisionist theories of the
origins and history of the Quran share a strong confidence in overturning
centuries of the Islamic tradition yet offer dramatically different conclusions
that clearly are in conflict among themselves.”
30-31
“A Wall Street Journal reporter published a lurid front-page
account, strongly hinting that all the German scholars had been Nazis and
suggesting that scholarly study of the Quran would provide shocking challenges
to the Muslim faith in the authenticity og the Quran. In response Michael Marx,
director of Corpus Coranicum Research Centre, wrote a scathing reply, poking
fun at the newspaper article. Marx argued that this article was an example of
the modern tendency to believe in vast conspiracy theories like that in The Da
Vinci Code, imagining fanciful scenarios of romantic historical research (a la
Indiana Jones) that would call into
question the entire history of a major religion, and which have certainly produced
entire industries of publishing, film, and tourism. More seriously, Marx
challenged the notion that all the German scholars were Nazis and also
questioned the tendency of journalists to focus only on revisionist theories of
the origins of Islam.” 30
Use of “We” in the
Quran for Allah
“Some scholars have even suggested that the use of “We”
implies a plurality of speakers, that is, the angels alongside God, but on
closer inspection this proves to be a weak argument loosely based on biblical
analogies. The Quran does not provide any example of angelic participation in
the creation. Instead of overlaying such a simplistic theological
interpretation onto the text, a literary approach will take seriously the
different contexts and forms of expression of its different voices and personas
found throughout the Quran. The shift from “I” to “We” for the principal speaker
is very characteristic of the Quranic discourse, and the use of the plural is
widely accepted as an example of the “plural of majesty” or the” royal we”,
where the plural is used for respect.” 49-50
Tafsir
Tawil: more esoteric interpretation
“The commentary al-Tabari (d. 923) is a milestone in the
detailed explanation of the Quran in terms of the sayings of the Prophet
Muhammad. Another important early interpreter is al-Thalabi (d. 1035), whose
(still unpublished) commentary has drawn recent attention as a masterful achievement
of intellectual synthesis. Other major commentaries were produced by
theologians such as al-Razi (d. 1210), from a Sunni perspective, and al Tabarsi
(d. 1153), from a Shi’i point of view.” 64
Why Saudi Arabia is
not keen on Archeological investigation
A highly conservative religious establishment sees no reason
why the traces of Judaism and Christianity should be celebrated in the homeland
of Islam, and its views digging up and displaying pagan idols as even more repugnant.
84
On this topic see my notes on Ziauddin Sardar’s Book Mecca: http://thefactsaboutislam.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/notes-and-select-quotes-from-book-mecca.html
Stylistic based claims
that the Quran has undergone stages of revision are mere speculation
“Obviously the notion that the Quran has gone through stages
of revision raises questions about how, and whose authority, later additions
could be made to the text. Admittedly, this observation is speculative, since
it is based entirely on internal stylistic evidence rather than on any external
proof; there are no manuscripts that
contain any earlier versions of these Quranic texts.” 97
Sleepers of Ephesus
“As usual , the Quran does not provide a fully detailed
version of the story , assuming instead that listeners are familiar with it..”
123
[This is interesting as the Quran does not go into much
detail about other people and events in the Quran, I would assume Carl Ernst
believes the immediate audience or some of the people amongst the immediate
audience of the Quranic Revelation were familiar with these topics – such as
the virgin birth, Jesus’ life and miracles, the life events of Abraham and
Moses]
Surah 116-117
“The interrogation of Jesus by God forms a dramatic parallel
with the interrogations of Jesus by his opponents in the New Testament, where
he is asked to declare whether he is “the Christ. The son of God” (Mathew
26:63) or “the king of the Jews” (John 18:33). In this case, Jesus firmly
denies making any claim of divinity for himself or his mother Mary. While this
charge does not precisely state Christian theological positions, since Mary is
not technically considered divine, it does represent the logical consequences
for monotheism of calling her “Mother of God” as was common in the Eastern
Church. Moreover Jesus also refuses to claim to have any divine knowledge,
saying, “You know what is in me, but I do not know what is in You” (5:116). He
presents his teaching as the pure monotheism commanded by God, to which he is
witness for humanity (5:117).” 198
Ernst is looking at this from a Protestant viewpoint rather than looking at it from the viewpoint of all known Christian understandings and practices with regards to Mary. There were people who worshipped Mary and in the minds of some Protestants Mary is worshipped/prayed to by Catholics as highlighted by the quote from James White and Taylor Marshall's citation of an ancient prayer found written on papyrus manuscript (p470), this manuscript is dated is dated to 250 CE.
Brewer's dictionary on Mariamites:
Worshippers of Mary, the mother of Jesus. They said the Trinity consisted of God the Father, God the Son, and Mary the mother of God.
Brewer's dictionary on Mariamites:
Worshippers of Mary, the mother of Jesus. They said the Trinity consisted of God the Father, God the Son, and Mary the mother of God.
See here for more on this topic: http://thefactsaboutislam.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/blog-aggressive-sid-cordle-and-lizzie.html
Why it’s difficult
for non Muslims to read the Quran:
-Media inflated claims
-Nearly complete lack of acquaintance with the text itself
-Cultural barriers
“Given the blank slate of sheer unfamiliarity with the Quran
among Americans and Europeans, it is perhaps inevitable that certain cultural
habits have become obstacles to an understanding of it. In the mood of anxiety
and fear of the post-9/11 era, it is perhaps understandable that one of these
habits would be the temptation to find quick answers in this ancient text, to
provide simple solutions to an urgent modern political problem. Unfortunately, nervous
haste all too readily leads to serious problems or misrepresentation, as
isolated phrases are made to stand in for a whole text, a single text is made o
stand for an entire religion, and extremist individuals magnified by the media
are taken to be representative of hundreds of millions of people in dozens of
different countries. These are not trivial mistakes; weighty and unfortunate
consequences flow from any distorted prejudice that substitutes real knowledge.”
4
Tidbits
Mid 1800s a newer approach emerged – chronological readings.
Printing did not take place on a large scale until the mid nineteenth century.
According to a tradition preserved by the Egyptian scholar al-Suyuti (d. 1505), no less a person than Ali had in his possession a copy of the Quran with the suras in some kind of chronological order. 73
Relying on appeals to authority is hardly a solution given the multiple authorities available today
Fairminded and reasonable approaches help understand the religious well springs of others
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