Flat-Texting: The Layers of Scripture

March 27, 2007

When thinking about a book like the Bible one should imagine the way it would appear in Adobe Photoshop. There are a series of layers piled up on top of each other. Each of these layers represents a book.. (or even sections within a book in cases like Isaiah). These layers represent different time periods and points of view. The interpreter must distinguish the layer that is under discussion and not conflate it with ideas drawn from another layer. That way of thinking is complex, but it comes naturally to anyone who gets accustomed to the way Photoshop works. It takes a little longer to develop in students of religious texts.

In Photoshop there comes a time, image completed, when you press "flatten image". In a moment those multiple layers are condensed.. the complexity of stacked sections gone. That is the way the Bible looks to many people.. as a unified book bound between two leather covers. My private verb for this kind of reading is "flat-texting". In other words, no history or context distinguishes the sections, they are just words to be read together and used to interpret each other. There is a mental button for "flatten book".

The Qur'an came into being in the course of about 20 years at the beginning of the 7th century AD. Its layers are therefore not as starkly diverse as those of the Bible, but it is still necessary for scholar and believer to separate the layers of the text. The fact of the Qur'an as a layered text is implicitly recognized by the identification of each Sura as Meccan or Medinan.. i.e. early or late in Muhammad's life. The Qur'an is divided into Suras (individual units of revelation), but on top of that schema is a second system: sections. The Qur'an is divided into thirty equal sections.. and these sections are marked within the text of all Qur'ans.

The odd thing about these sections is that they can fall anywhere in a chapter. They do not follow the sense of a passage but simply divide it spatially. The following is the beginning of a list as to where these sections fall (ajza'):

• 1 – Al Fatiha 1 – Al Baqarah 141
• 2 – Al Baqarah 142 - Al Baqarah 252
• 3 – Al Baqarah 253 - Al Imran 92
• 4 – Al Imran 93 - An Nisaa 23
• 5 – An Nisaa 24 - An Nisaa 147

As you can see the sections cut right into the middle of the Suras.. the organic units of the Qur'an. The reason for this division is obvious enough: it allows for the completion of the Qur'an in the course of a month by reading roughly equal sections. This style of division strengthens the flat-text approach to the Qur'an. It would be as if the "Through the Bible in a Year" schedule got set into the margins of the Bible with as much formality and standardization as the verse and chapter divisions..

Perhaps flat-texting should not be seen so much as an issue for believers in sacred texts as an issue for consumers of anthologies.. which is, after all, a word that includes both the Bible and the Qur'an. Both scriptures take and bind together sections/books that had an original context elsewhere (Paul's letters, Psalms, Muhammad's revelations). In the process of binding these works together they become anthologies.. and anthologies encourage readers to see texts together.. to read them as unities. It would be like giving out an anthology of Classical Greek and Roman literature from Homer to Sophocles to Virgil. Who would be surprised if students let those texts run together in their minds? The "book" format prompts us to understand a text as unified.. and we push that "flatten text" button in our minds.