Quran and Community

Quran and Community
(Excerpted from “The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam” by Professor Ebrahim Moosa)

On further reflection, it will become apparent that the Quran itself prefigures a community of listeners and participants: without this audience it ceases to be the Quran. Let me explain. Literally the word quran means a “recitation.” As a revelation it is recited by the human voice and heard by the human ear. In the final instance the message must both be heard and understood by the “heart,” as the Quran literally puts it. In all this a fundamental presumption persists: the Quran as revelation requires an audience of listeners and speakers. In other words, a community is integral to it being a revelation. If one does not take that audience and community seriously, implicitly one has not taken revelation seriously. This audience is not a passive audience, but an interactive audience that engages with a performative revelation.

Something has happened in the reading of the Quran in modern Islam that goes in the opposite direction. Many Muslim audiences have little sensibility for the complex ways a revealed and performance text like the Quran is interpreted. The fact is that how the interpretation of the Quran is to be approached is not as easily available as free copies of the holy book. Instead many people read it like one reads a medical textbook or an engineering manual. So the Quran has been turned into a sovereign, passive, non-interactive text. In other words, it ceases to be a revelation that melts the heart of the reciter and/or listener. It no longer makes reverent readers’ skin shiver in awe of the Divine. Instead of having readers being in awe of God, fierce warrior-readers of the Quran these days scare the wits out of believers and non-believers alike. Gone is how the Quran itself describes its effect on listeners and reciters. “God bestows from on high, the best of all teachings in the shape of a divine writ, fully consistent with itself, repeating each statement in manifold forms – [A Divine writ] that makes the flesh [literally, skin] of all those who stand in awe of their Sustainer shiver; but in the end their flesh and their hearts soften at the remembrance of the grace of God” (Q. 39:23).

….A commonsensical reading of this complex text would be far too inadequate. The Quran as a text is alive within contemporary Muslim communities and I subject to multiple uses. In the past too it had contexts where it negotiated multiple agendas of the society in which it was first revealed; in short it has a political history. By “political history,” I mean it also occurs against the backdrop of power and history. In its multiple iterations, the Quran continues to develop new and multiple histories as it is embodied in communities. In other words, we need to know not only the detailed social contexts in which God’s revelation is played out in history but also how it played out in history. For this reason it is so crucial to study the different communities of the Quran. Without the voice of the communities engaged with their scripture, we can hardly make sense of the revelation and the various communities of revelation. (pg 124-125)

(Excerpted from “The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam” by Professor Ebrahim Moosa)