Voices of Islam (18 page)

oughly pervaded by calligraphy and other types of Qur’anic symbolism.

Of course, Western artistic and literary traditions have also been shaped by equally wide-ranging Biblical influences. However, the Qur’anic equivalents of these manifestations, and their complex historical pathways of creativity and transformation, are usually invisible to non-Muslim (and unfortunately, even to many Western-educated Muslim) viewers. To take only one example: the colors of the four Qur’anic elements, which are inseparable from their symbolic eschatological and metaphysical associations in the Qur’an, have often implicitly determined the color schemes of religious structures, paint- ings, calligraphy, and other visual arts throughout the Islamic world. Hence, one encounters the relative rarity of red (symbolizing the infernal Fire), and the corresponding insistence on the blue of the spiritual heavens, or the even more pervasive presence of green, associated with the Water of Life/Spirit/

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Prophethood and the complex spiritual symbolism of vegetation and the eschatological Gardens and streams repeatedly mentioned in the Qur’an. Likewise, no Muslim familiar with the Qur’an can encounter a prayer-niche or the lamps of any mosque without experiencing an immediate resonance with the elaborate metaphysical imagery of the famous Light Verses of the Qur’an (Qur’an 24:35–38).

Another quasi-liturgical motif is the importance of Arabic calligraphy across all Muslim cultures. This constitutes the most revered form of the vis- ual arts, so that the practice of calligraphy may become a demanding spiritual discipline that begins in childhood and unfolds throughout life. The sacred role of Arabic calligraphy also includes, by extension, the similarly central role (both artistically and economically) of the ‘‘arts of the book’’ in Islam, from gilding, paper-making, marbling, and leather-working to the actual master- pieces of Islamicate poetry and miniature painting that such arts help com- municate and illuminate. Much the same is true, on an even wider scale, of the role of Arabic script in the textile arts, which have often been economi- cally central to premodern cultures and economies, or in the related arts of jewelry, metalworking, and glass.

In addition to the centrality of the Arabic script wherever it is still used as the script for official national languages, the script of the Qur’an is a personal marker of religious identity in private and familial contexts. This begins with the prominent display in most Muslim homes of framed calligraphy of the Qur’an, as well as divine names, prayers, or other distinctive religious images (the Ka‘ba in Mecca, and so on), along with the special reverence accorded to familial copies of the Qur’an. On an even more private and intimate level, Muslims in many parts of the world wear amulets engraved with short lines or verses of the Qur’an—especially the
Basmalla,
the
Fatiha,
or the Throne Verse (Qur’an 2:255)—or seal rings engraved with the shorter Qur’anic phrases or the names of key sacred figures, or they carry prayer beads often embossed with divine names or similar Qur’anic expressions. Yet again, none of these omnipresent visual reflections of the Arabic Qur’an, in either their spiritual–aesthetic, symbolic, or social dimensions, are tied to or dependent upon prior literary knowledge of the Qur’an and its meanings.

Experiencing the Qur’an: Ritual and Liturgical Contexts

The liturgical presence of the Qur’an, which combines its near-universal aural and visual presence with active recitation in various forms of prayer and divine remembrance, is central to the three basic ritual cycles shared by virtually all forms of Islam, as well as to many other aspects of everyday life. These ritual cycles include the life cycle from birth to death, the daily individ- ual cycle of the various forms of prayer (necessarily involving Qur’anic Arabic), and the annual public cycle of holy days and months, which has

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significant local and sectarian variations. In each of these situations, prior to the recent availability of printed Qur’anic texts
8
and the even more recent invention of sound recording, there was a virtually universal need— already emphasized in the earliest Hadith and historical accounts—for highly trained, spiritually effective local reciters of the Qur’an, as well as for widespread memorization of the text, given the rarity of handwritten texts in premodern times. Thus, one finds throughout the Muslim world elaborate traditional systems for training in memorization, as well as even more complex training institutions and rules governing the formal recitation of the Qur’an.
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In traditional and long-standing Muslim cultures, however, the presence of the Arabic Qur’an is most immediately visible not in what we usually think of as formally religious rituals but in a host of smaller customary activities that are so omnipresent as to be virtually automatic and unconscious. These include the everyday usage of the cautionary phrase ‘‘if God wills’’ (
In sha’ Allah,
based on a Qur’anic injunction) after any reference to future actions or eventualities, the even more widespread recitation of the
Basmalla
(the formula ‘‘In the Name of God, the All-Loving, the All-Compassionate’’ which opens all but one of the chapters of the Qur’an) or of the opening
Surat al-Fatiha
(Qur’an 1:1–7) before eating or initiating virtually any action, the recitation of the
Fatiha
or another prayer formula when passing by places of burial, the automatic recitation of standard Qur’anically based blessings after any mention of Muhammad or other prophets and holy fi or the widespread use of prayer beads for recitation of Qur’anic formulae of the divine names and other invocations. One could also include in this category rules for the specially reverential treatment accorded to the written Arabic text (
mushaf
) of the Qur’an, both in public places and within the home. The text of the Qur’an is normally accorded a place of high dignity, often with a distinctive reading-stand, and should never be touched or opened without special ablutions, intentions, and purifi tion, as in the standard preparations for the ritual prayer itself.

In terms of the major rituals shared across most Muslim cultures and sects, the recitation of the Qur’an—either in elaborate public, communal forms in more traditional cultures or in more private or familial forms in Western set- tings—is central to many rituals associated with the Muslim life cycle. Rituals involving recitation of the Qur’an lead from birth through name giving, circumcision, the daily practice of ritual prayer, betrothal and marriage, and grave illness and death, with special prayers associated with funeral rituals. The performance of the daily cycle of five ritual prayers presupposes the memorization and faultless recitation of at least several shorter Suras of the Qur’an, as well as related ritual formulae of blessings, thanks, and petitionary prayer also in Qur’anic Arabic. Thus, a child is considered sufficiently respon- sible to begin performing the daily prayers only when she can correctly memorize a sufficient number of Qur’anic passages.

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Although the individual recitation of this Qur’anic repertoire might take on a somewhat routine character within the daily performance of the ritual prayers, the communal performance of the prayer, whether at the Friday noon prayer or in other group settings, provides occasions when the prayer leader (
imam
) will expose the worshipper to other, less familiar sections of the Qur’an. In addition, the rules of the ritual prayer itself allow each individ- ual to expand and include passages of the Qur’an almost indefi itely. One result of this constantly expanding, lifelong process of familiarization and rec- ollection of the Qur’an is that the Muslim is gradually led and prepared to discover—often in the very process of praying itself—the spiritual connec- tions between the experiences of one’s own life and the corresponding les- sons and insights conveyed by verses of the Qur’an. Significantly, both the individual verses of the Qur’an and the nearly infinite phenomena of creation, including all human experience, are described in the Qur’an by the same Ara- bic term:
ayat,
or ‘‘divine Signs.’’ As one can see when visiting mosques almost anywhere in the world, the completion of the ritual prayer is often the prelude to individual or group recitation of traditional Arabic litanies (drawn from the Qur’an and the Prophetic sayings) of prayer and recollec- tion, known as
dhikr.

While Muslim societies all have important holy days and related ritual events in which Qur’anic recitation and prayer play an important role, the importance of the Qur’an is particularly heightened during the fasting month of Ramadan, which is closely associated in many Prophetic traditions with the revelation of the Qur’an itself. Thus, during the evenings of Ramadan, special
Tarawih
prayers and the public recitation of portions of the Qur’an are part of emotionally moving rituals. At the same time, Muslims are enjoined to make a special effort to read the entire text of the Qur’an—traditionally in the original Arabic, although very recently in translated versions—during the month of Ramadan. This period is typically devoted to heightened contemplation and withdrawal from the routines and distractions of normal daily life.

Cultural and Intellectual Dimensions: The Qur’an in the Religious Sciences and the Islamic Humanities

For more than a millennium, whenever Muslims have sought to under- stand the meaning and teachings of the Qur’an, they have not turned to translations, but to the study of the Arabic Qur’an itself. The demanding intellectual study of the Qur’an, whatever its original guiding motivations— whether legal, theological, spiritual, or political—has always been mediated. That is to say, such study has normally been embedded within a complex web of traditional interpretive perspectives and assumptions that are pro- foundly interrelated, even when particular traditions may articulate very

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different conclusions and notions of scriptural authority. Two essential, and necessarily complementary, dimensions have been associated with this ongoing mediating process: the inherited complex of the traditional Arabic religious sciences and the omnipresent, constantly evolving infl ence of locally adapted popular forms of the Islamic humanities. However, neither of these dimensions is readily accessible to nonspecialist Western students who approach the Qur’an through translations. Even more important, as intimated above, the parameters of these Islamic contextual and hermeneutic traditions rarely correspond to the assumptions today’s Western-educated students normally have about the nature and expected uses of the Bible, or indeed of books and scriptures more generally.

To begin with, the serious intellectual study of the actual meanings of the Qur’an—in contrast to the different ritual contexts summarized above—pre- supposes, even for native Arabic speakers, years of dedicated study of the uniquely complex language and symbolic vocabulary of the Qur’an. This is a demanding process of familiarization with the text of the Qur’an that is quite different from rote memorization. As a result, scholarly preparation for actually understanding the Qur’an has for centuries been the preserve of a relatively small—usually urban and male—learned elite.
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Even more important, this basic initiation into the intellectual study of the meanings and depths of the Qur’an has required, since the earliest Islamic centuries, the equally demanding mastery of a number of related preparatory and inter- pretive religious sciences requiring years of preparation. These essential con- textual disciplines include the following: Qur’anic grammar and syntax, Arabic lexicography and philology, Qur’anic rhetoric (
balagha
), Prophetic Hadith, Islamic sacred and Prophetic history (
sira, ta’rikh,
and
qisas al- anbiya’
), specialized literatures illuminating the historical contexts of Qur’anic revelations (
asbab al-nuzul
and
tafsir
), dialectical theology (
kalam
), and the principles of jurisprudence (
usul al-fi
). Even today, reliable scholarly writing about the Qur’an and its interpretation necessarily presup- poses an informed awareness of the structures, procedures, and sources of this historically accumulated body of related Arabic intellectual disciplines.

Because of these historical and intellectual factors, traditional Muslim cul- tures and their scholastic representatives, even today, have rarely admitted a religiously significant role for independent vernacular translations of the Ara- bic Qur’an. Just as important, one does not fi any significant movement arguing for the sort of independent, highly individualized scriptural interpre- tation, based uniquely on such vernacular translations, that modern readers tend to take for granted when they think about religion. As any student of Islam quickly discovers, the locally operative forms of each Muslim’s religious beliefs and practices have almost unimaginably complex and diverse historical roots and sources, and those actual religious realities can rarely be under- stood as somehow ‘‘dictated’’ by a particular verse or passage in a translated Qur’an.

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Instead, the locally prevalent forms of Islam in a traditional Muslim setting normally reflect those Islamic humanities that have illuminated and elabo- rated, in a locally meaningful way, the central ethical and spiritual teachings of the Qur’an.
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When we look more closely at the historical origins of the Islamic humanities, their most infl l exponents were often highly learned scholars and poets who sought to communicate the essential teach- ings of the Qur’an and Hadith (as mediated by the traditional religious disci- plines) to wider Muslim audiences living in extremely diverse linguistic and cultural settings. This recurrent creative sociocultural process of interpretive communication of the Qur’an is already well illustrated by the relation- ship between the Qur’an and the thousands of Prophetic teachings recorded in the collections of Hadith. Many of these sayings take the form of the Prophet’s particular interpretation or concrete application of abstract, sym- bolic Qur’anic concepts in more accessible language or through memorable stories and imagery more directly meaningful for different questioners and audiences.