The Author of Sartor Resartus
Critiques the Qur'an

May 24, 2007

Thomas Carlyle takes on the Qur'an in his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. He sets down what seems like a vicious attack:

Very curious: if one were sought for 'discrepancies' of national taste,' here surely were the most eminent instance of that!... I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; —insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.

Tell us what you really think, Thomas!

If I read someone laying into me like that, I would probably put down the review and figure someone just doesn't like me. But actually Carlyle has a soft spot for the Qur'an; he just has a funny way of showing it. Note his comments on the following page:

When once you get this confused coil of a Koran fairly off your hands, and have it behind you at a distance, the essential type of it begins to disclose itself; and in this there is a merit quite other than the literary one. If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that. Once would say that the primary character of the Koran is this of its genuineness, of its being a bona-fide book.

Now it is a haunting book that gets into you by its genuineness. Carlyle has torn down the Qur'an only to be able to build it up again on his own (Romantic) terms. We see here a miniature version of what Coleridge does to the poetry of Wordsworth in his Biographia Literaria.

A little later Carlyle describes Muhammad as "an uncultured semi-barbarous Son of Nature, much of the Bedouin still clinging to him". By evoking Muhammad as a "Son of Nature" Carlyle simultaneously pushes him away and elevates him into a Romantic hero. The Qur'an can be understood as the type of book that a "Son of Nature" would deliver. Faults may be pointed out by the literary critic.. but that would be a facile way of talking about something so elemental as the Qur'an.

It is important to remember what kinds of books Carlyle wrote. He is the author of Sartor Resartus, a kind of philosophical metafiction. At the beginning of this book is an editorial introduction in which the purported author Diogenes Teufelsdröckh is sketched and the composition of the book described. This is all fictionalized information.. but it allows Carlyle the chance to comment critically on his own work:

Considered as an Author, Herr Teufelsdröckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement... of true logical method and sequence there is too little... Many sections are of debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnameable; whereby the Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded...

This is the kind of book that Carlyle, as author, could glory in. His critique of the Qur'an could have almost been lifted verbatim from his own self-critique!

I would add to this that a Romantic sensibility is an ideal way to approach the Qur'an. It allows for a certain level of jumbledness in a work. It also is comfortable reading for the fragment instead of for a linear unity. My love for Arabic literature absolutely stems from the way my taste was formed by major works of the Romantic tradition. Let's see. Read through Moby Dick, then Biographia Literaria and maybe Don Juan, and then move forward in time and plow through the poetry of John Ashbery. I predict: you will be well trained to read through long stretches of low-level prose, only to be rewarded by stumbling across something beautiful. That is the experience of reading that I most enjoy..

But the Qur'an is not the product of Romanticism. Carlyle points to an additional issue:

Very curious: if one sought for 'discrepancies of national taste,' here surely were the most eminent instance of that!

This is a slightly uncomfortable topic.. but why are we so nervous about addressing the way aesthetic appreciation is in part a cultural acquisition? It follows that different cultures will have different aesthetic standards. I try to tell students that if they dislike the style of the Qur'an they will have trouble with the entire tradition of Arabic literature. The hadith, the history, the poetry, the story-telling.. it is all much more fragmented than we would like. Which makes sense since in the West we have been raised on a tradition that values linear stories and a strong authorial presence. Homer stands somewhere back there.. and his influence can be felt in the Saturday morning cartoons. But in the Islamic tradition it is the Qur'an that has formed aesthetic taste.