Reading the Constitution:
The Qur'an

June 5, 2006

As we ride the metro, there seems to generally be a handful of men with a small book open in front of them.. or even holding a laminated small sheet.. these are always Qur'ans. The men read silently or speak the cadences of their book with barely audible voice. Getting used to the presence of the Qur'an, whether as a chanted voice in the elevator or as a prominent presence in bookstores, is one of the requirements of life in the Middle East. In the past I have told people that life in the Middle East is a lot like Bible College.. in terms of the ubiquity of religious practices and the assumption of a set of common values.

This time I have an extra stimulus for noting the setting and use of the Qur'an: I will be teaching a course on it next spring. I am delighted at the opportunity because I love the Qur'an, and consider it a great book.. which also challenges a lot of our ideas about what a "book" is. I also think the class offers a chance for me to get right what has frustrated me in several of my own attempts to get a decent class on the Qur'an..

It was here in Cairo, as part of the year-long CASA program, that I took a class on the Qur'an taught by a learned Egyptian. He was a quiet and decent man, and obviously knew the Qur'an well enough to back up any of his opinions with a quotation.. that is to say, he had a fluent familiarity with the Qur'an that I can never hope to emulate. He was quite clear about our inability to understand the Qur'an: without knowing the interpretations and history of thought concerning the Qur'an it was impossible for us to comment on it.. and so he told us what to think about different issues. He used the metaphor of the American constitution: the Qur'an is the constitution that governs Muslim life. Just as a legal document such as the American constitution must be framed through a tradition of legal opinions, so the Qur'an.

That constitution metaphor stuck with me.. and I let it revolve in my head for a bit. But I don't think that the justices on the American Supreme Court.. or even the aggregate of judges that sit in the higher courts.. hold any monopoly on the Constitution of the United States, nor on a founding document such as the Declaration of Independence. In fact, I can easily imagine a point (at which may be on the verge of arriving) in which the plain words of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights become distorted by the twists of legal thought. Non-legal- scholar-me could stand up and use those plain words as my own. My opinion would not bring about a big change in the way laws are enforced through the land.. but I can still know something about what I am saying.. something more than a judge on the Supreme Court.. and perhaps draw sympathetic voices.

It would sound crazy to my Qur'an teacher.. I am sure.. but I think there is a similar freedom when it comes to the Qur'an. That is to say, it is possible to read those words and grasp them for oneself.. and damn what other people say it has to mean. Which is not to open the gates to saying anything one wants.. but simply to recognize that this is not a closed book that must be approached via centuries of commentary.. or even through the traditions embodied in Hadith. That is my highest hope for a class on the Qur'an: that students, even as they get a sense of its history, would also find a freedom to approach it as a book not just with Islamic concerns.. but with more broadly human concerns. None of this is revolutionary.. it is what we expect when it comes to teaching any classic work, whether the Bible or Shakespeare.. but with the Qur'an it seems much harder to allow this freedom.

Words are strangely powerful.. they have the tendency to evade efforts to contextualize which invariably seek to control their meaning. A society can put an immense effort into controlling a book, and some shop owner or field hand will one day look up and say: but look what it says here in plain language! They may well be wrong.. and perhaps historically those words were used in a very different situation.. perhaps they are even a mistranslation.. but there the words are on the page, and they are suddenly available. I think we could call this the vertical ability of words. And nothing could be more Quranic than to emphasize that vertical ability: think of the verb anzala: revelation descends from above.