Perfidy, Qur’anic Apostasy or Hermeneutics?

Raised in a Muslim family and as an unthinking person in matters of faith, I have generally never questioned the validity of my parents’ faith; indeed, on occasion, have viscerally defended Islam against any and all takers. This, despite an affliction of a malady than can be loosely described as doubt; I have never abandoned my faith, probably because it is too late in life for me to seek different pastures anyway. There is much to be said about comforts of familiarity.

Why, then, this persistent gnawing and unease about faith? Of all the unsettling thoughts that seems to eat away at me in particular is an apparent disconnect between oft repeated propositions that the Qur’an was revealed for ALL people and ostensibly for all times. However, the contextual references (in Qur’an) of time and places consistently speak of and to only one set of people that were living in the Arabian Peninsula (at least some from the much maligned Banu Qur’aysh) during the time of Qur’anic revelation.

I certainly do not have issues with the latter, for the moral and ethical dictates in the Qur’an transcend time and locale, though the former is much thornier to grasp. This may be so because the almost exclusive Qur’anic references to people of Hijaz (Arabian Peninsula), by default, exclude me, (persons from the Indian sub-continent) and others too numerous to mention.

This angst was substantially laid to rest after I came across an arcane sounding term called “hermeneutics”. According to Webster’s, it means “A theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of scriptural text; its foremost proponent insofar Qur’anic text is Professor Nasr Abu Zayd, a Professor of Islamic Studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo now living in exile in Europe. My curiosity was now properly piqued, not the least because Al-Azhar happens to be my late father’s Alma-mater (Dr. Khalidi, PhD 1947).

Now, if we apply a methodology of interpretation to the Qur’an, we are faced with certain immutable dictates, none of which I portend to question, only ask for further contextual clarification, if such is possible.

According to Farid Essack, a Lecturer in Religion at University of the Western Cape, South Africa, “Interpreters are people” who carry the inescapable baggage and conviviality of the human condition”. Further, hermeneutics assumes that every person comes to a text carrying his or her own questions and expectations and that it would be “absurd to demand from the interpreter to set aside his or her subjectivity and interpret a text without pre-understanding and the questions initiated by it, [because without these] the text is mute”.

Pejoratively stated to me, then, text without context is merely a pretext for an interpreter’s own biases.

Furthermore, he elaborates that ‘The socio-historical and linguistic milieu of the Qur’anic revelation is reflected in the contents, style, objectives and language of the Qur’an”, and “even a casual perusal of the Qur’an will indicate that, notwithstanding its claim to be ‘guide for humankind’ (2:175) revealed by the ‘the sustainer of the universe’ (1:1), it is generally addressed to the people of Hijaz (present day Arabian peninsula), who lived during the period of its revelation”.

Abu Zayd’s central concept, according to Charles Hirschkind who wrote about him in Stanford Humanities Review, “from the moment Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, it, at once, entered the realm of human history and became subject to its historical and sociological laws or regularities. Thus, now, irreversibly rent from its divine origins, the text became humanized, subjected to all the embodying cultural, political, and ideological elements prevalent in the seventh-century Arabian society”.

Quoting Abu Zayd directly,

“The Qur’an… is a fixed religious text, of the literal wording, but once it has been subjected to human reason, it becomes a "concept" [mafhum], which loses its fixedness as it moves and its meanings proliferate... From the moment of its enunciation, the divine text was shaped, and continues to be reshaped, through the operation of human reason, such that the distance now separating it from the divine is so vast as to render the text all but human. "Religious texts, in the final analysis, are nothing but linguistic texts, belonging to a specific cultural structure and produced in accord with the rules of that culture”.

The late Professor Fazlur Rahman of University of Chicago also espoused similar thoughts, in “The Message of Fazlur Rahman”, M. Yahya Birt lays out his views; “even if we use some of the modern critical tools of historical enquiry, the results can be intellectually liberating, yet Islamically consistent”. For Fazlur Rahman, the Qur’an ‘is not a book of abstract ethics, neither is it the legal document that Muslim lawyers made it out to be. It is a work of moral admonition through and through.’ (1985a:8), Qur’an is a response to early stages of the Islamic community that were historically recorded, and it consists of moral, religious, and social directives in answer to specific problems of that time.

Yahya Birt says that Fazlur Rahman argued that although a Qur’anic injunction might have been occasioned by a certain situation, it is nevertheless universal in its general application (1982:17), provided that the principle behind the concept is controlling, rather than the literal wording. ‘By examining the occasions of revelation, one can come to understand the rationale for such answers and then deduce general laws’.

Further, Yahya Birt insists, ‘Fazlur Rahman’s radicalism, in Islamic terms, is to insist that the Qur’an is ‘literally God’s response through Muhammad’s mind to an historic situation.’ If Prophet Muhammad was merely a passive recipient of this response, then how can we discern abstract ethical principles behind the revelation of verses? If we cannot, then what remains are slavish and literal attempts to recreate the society of the Prophet, misguided and inadequate as they may be. Fazlur Rahman seems to value the functionality of the Qur’an but less so for ‘its meditative and worshipful modes’.

Indeed, as Muqtader Khan of Adrian College says “In an Islamic democracy every individual is a vicegerent of God (Qur’an 2:30) and therefore has the legitimate authority to act in God’s name. Thus every citizen has the right to interpret and claim what is law (divine or otherwise). Though sovereignty is always God’s in principle, human agency is what matters in practice”.

This hit me like a ton of bricks, after re-reading and absorbing, albeit slowly, these seemingly radical and heretical ideas, I came to the realization that indeed a religious text, infallible and immutable such as the Qur’an, is only so because of its ethical and moral efficacy, interspersed with reason and rationality in all affairs human.