Voices of Islam (20 page)

devoid of the familiar markers of punctuation, paragraphs, and capitalization that translators so helpfully—and often misleadingly—supply in English. Nor do the traditional verse designations necessarily refl actual divisions of meaning or subject, since they often derive instead from recurring end rhymes in the original recited Arabic. This characteristic lack of punctuation in the original Arabic can lead to signifi issues of interpretation. For example, in a number of cases involving important theological and juridical matters, the Qur’anic text can be read and understood in quite different ways, depending on where the reader chooses to make a stop when reading a verse or sentence. Equally important, the Arabic of the Qur’an includes, as a distinctive and constantly recurring structural feature, highly ambiguous pronoun references, with each alternative reading yielding different, yet often remarkably revealing sets of meanings. This striking feature is almost never refl in English translations of the Qur’an, apart from the standard use of capitalization to indicate apparently ‘‘divine’’ references. This is particu- larly unfortunate, since this characteristic indeterminacy of pronouns—and the multiple alternative meanings to which it gives rise—is one of the many highly distinctive features of Qur’anic rhetoric and literary structure that was later carried over into the mystical poetic traditions of the Islamic humanities in Persian and other languages.

For the beginning reader, the importance of these characteristic Qur’anic features of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and multiple meanings is that transla- tions ignoring such points deprive the student of the challenge of discerning multiple perspectives of meaning in the sacred text, which is so central to the experience of discovering the Arabic Qur’an. To put this more plainly, the result of such neglect, for readers relying on a translation of the Qur’an, is roughly comparable to the difference between reading Plato’s
Republic
or Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake
in the original and in a condensed
Cliff Notes
study guide version.

The ‘‘Literal’’ is Intrinsically Symbolic

Virtually nothing in the Arabic Qur’an has a straightforward and prosaic meaning. The problematic and explicitly symbolic nature of the key expres- sions of the Qur’an is constantly highlighted and developed in Suras from all periods, perhaps most dramatically in the mystifying language of the ear- liest short eschatological Suras, which are normally found at the end of En- glish translations. In Arabic, the uniquely mysterious, open-ended quality of Qur’anic language is particularly apparent when one compares the unique Arabic idiom of the Qur’an with the simpler and more understandable language of the Prophet’s sayings (Hadith), which indeed are often responses to his followers’ requests to clarify the unfamiliar symbols and vocabulary of the Qur’an. The texts of the Hadith, originally transmitted orally, are in a far more accessible, often prosaic, form of Arabic, whose rhetorical

Encountering the Qur’an
79

and structural qualities are quite different from the unique rhetoric of the Qur’an.

Thus the reader of the Qur’an needs to pay close attention to those passages that repeatedly refer to its central assumption of the existence of multiple, often sharply contrasted, degrees of spiritual understanding. This basic human reality is reflected throughout the Qur’an in the corresponding usage of appropriate rhetoric and symbols designed to communicate very dif- ferently to readers with varying spiritual, intellectual, and practical interests, with their distinctive receptivities and stages of discernment. The Qur’an repeatedly suggests to its readers, often in dramatically highlighted terms (as at Qur’an 3:7), how it is meant to be understood on different levels and how much of its language will defy the understanding of all but the most inspired readers.

What this means is that in the Qur’an, it is often precisely the ‘‘literal’’ Ara- bic reading that is overtly and quite intentionally symbolic, in ways that can often not be captured at all (at least without lengthy commentaries) in trans- lations into English or other non-Semitic languages. This constant reitera- tion of the profoundly symbolic nature of the Qur’an—as indeed of every dimension of creation—means that readers of the Qur’an, whether in the Arabic or in the translated language, are repeatedly summoned to acknowl- edge their own existential ignorance with regard to at least some of the Qur’an’s most central expressions and symbols. At the same time, however, such characteristic reminders of one’s initial ignorance (or ‘‘heedlessness’’) are clearly meant to provoke a potentially revealing recognition of the essen- tial spiritual mysteries evoked by so many challenging Qur’anic passages, because these repeated reminders of the Qur’an’s own intrinsic interpretive ambiguity force each serious reader to search for the appropriate practical, intellectual, and spiritual keys that might help to open up those mysteries. This inherent Qur’anic problem of existential ignorance and mystery has nothing to do with being a ‘‘beginner’’ or somehow lacking appropriate sources of information. Instead, as has been attested by centuries of Qur’anic exegesis from the most diverse perspectives and traditions, this eventually illuminating experience of perplexity and mystery only increases in propor- tion to one’s learning and familiarity with the Arabic Qur’an. This is a point where the faithful literalness of Arberry’s translation of the Qur’an particu-

larly well serves his English readers.
20

Awareness and Experience

Some of the most influential traditional commentators on the Qur’an have focused on its insistence on the ongoing existential interplay between inner ‘‘knowing’’ (
‘ilm,
a term perhaps better translated here as ‘‘spiritual aware- ness’’) and spiritually appropriate action (
‘amal
).
21
In other words, the cen- tral metaphysical teachings of the Qur’an are expressed in such a way that

80
Voices of Tradition

the engaged reader can never withdraw into an abstract, purely intellectual and theoretical attitude toward the text. Instead, readers are obliged to make the essential existential connection between the symbolic teachings of the Qur’an and those dimensions of action and experience that reveal both the depths and the limitations of our awareness, as they gradually open up a deeper, uniquely individual appreciation of the realities underlying the Qur’anic symbols. This ascending spiral of realization is inseparable from the decisive role of imagination—or what we could more broadly call ‘‘spiri- tual intuition’’—in perceiving and penetrating the meanings of the Qur’an.

This basic principle of interpretation through active participation—at once intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual—is equally applicable to any transla- tion of the Qur’an. In practice, it means that each reader is obliged to imagi- natively ‘‘perform’’ the Qur’an by discovering the actual experiences to which each key symbolic expression refers, just as one must imaginatively read a theatrical work or decipher a great poem.
22
Otherwise, a less active or engaged reading will tend to render the Qur’an fl t and meaningless, or to turn it into a purely intellectual enterprise. The potential to appreciate and apply this principle of active participation has nothing at all to do with the particular reader’s cultural or even religious background. Indeed many of the suggestions for readers of translations outlined in the next section

may be easier for non-Muslim students to put into action, since their active questioning and inquiry may be less restricted by the range of pious cultural preconceptions normally surrounding any sacred text.

The Musical Unity of the Qur’an

One of the most distinctive features of the Arabic Qur’an—often only fee- bly suggested in translation—is its distinctive unity of meaning and expres- sion, which is manifested in the ‘‘ideographic,’’ semantically unifying function of its triliteral Arabic consonantal roots. Like classical Chinese char- acters, each of these linguistic roots expresses a rich range of broadly related meanings. These different inherent meanings, like harmonic correspond- ences in a musical composition, all resonate with the occurrence of each word derived from a particular root. Equally important, many of the meanings and grammatical functions that are normally expressed in English by very differ- ent words, which we immediately recognize as quite distinct ‘‘parts of speech,’’ are instead expressed in the Qur’an by slightly differing grammatical forms of the
same
underlying Arabic root. Thus each appearance of the same verbal root, whatever its grammatical or other context may be, immediately brings to mind all of the other contexts of this same root, which together form a sort of conceptual hologram or semantic whole. At another level, the Arabic roots of the Qur’an form intimately related, ‘‘cross-referential’’ families of meaning, which likewise intersect and resonate in the same way. This is why Kassis’s
A Concordance of the Qur’an
is such an indispensable tool

Encountering the Qur’an
81

for discovering these unifying Arabic roots and semantic complexes beneath the far greater number of disparate words that must inevitably be used in any English translation.

There is simply no way that Indo-European languages can express (except in rare forms of poetry) this fundamental feature of Qur’anic language. Those of us who speak Western languages can best imagine the linguistic and seman- tic resonances of the Qur’an by analogy with the procedures and effects of musical composition. Hence the powerful effects of simply
listening
to the Qur’an, even without the added complexities of trying to understand its language, are already impossible to reduce to any satisfactory form of simple prosaic expression. Perhaps most important, this holographic quality of Qur’anic Arabic means that each passage is immediately related, by a rich web of associated meanings and resonances, to virtually every other passage in the text. In addition, there are a host of distinctive rhythmic, rhyming, and stylistic features that further accentuate and intensify this musical and semantic unity. One of the most striking and pervasive of these features, as

in the Hebrew Bible, is the fact that each Arabic letter of the Qur’an directly corresponds to a specifi number.
23
This added mathematical dimension of textual resonance allowed traditional Muslim interpreters to call forth nearly infinite possibilities of semantic correspondences that further accentuate both the interconnections and the depths of meaning that arise within the Qur’an.

The ‘‘Verbal’’ Universe of the Creative Divine Act

Another fundamental feature of the Arabic Qur’an, which is also invisible in English prose translations, is the active, intrinsically ‘‘verbal’’ nature of Qur’anic language. Each triliteral Arabic root normally reflects an underlying active verbal meaning. More particularly, in the metaphysical contexts assumed throughout the Qur’an, God is normally understood as the ultimate creative ‘‘Actor.’’ A sense of this inherently active quality is retained in the many derived forms (‘‘verbal nouns’’, participles, and so on) of those triliteral Arabic roots that are usually translated in English as more abstract concepts, such as nouns, adjectives, gerunds, adverbs, and so forth. In radical contrast to this verbal, active immediacy of the Arabic Qur’an, the underlying struc- ture of English and other Indo-European languages reflects a stable,
object- based
world of subject-agents, their acts, and the objects of those actions, which are implicitly situated on the same extended ‘‘horizontal’’ plane of spatial and temporal relations. Within this linguistic and metaphysical frame- work, we naturally assume that it is these subjects and objects (the ‘‘nouns’’) that are real and thus are part of an objective spatiotemporal continuum of past, present, and future. In the language of the Qur’an, how- ever, what is real is not these ‘‘things,’’ but the
divine presence
—the actual, unique, immediately creative divine Act, including all of its outwardly unfolding manifestations.

82
Voices of Tradition

This fundamental metaphysical perception, which is constantly articulated in the Qur’an as an immediate presence and reality (not as some argument or theory), means that within the Qur’an all possible voices, perspectives, and relations—that is, all the discrete entities and spatiotemporal extensions we normally take to comprise our everyday experience—are
simultaneously
expressed and perceived as a single divine Voice and Act. This omnipresent divine reality is concretely expressed in the verbal, inherently active, and instantaneous expressions that are built into the distinctive rhetoric of the Qur’an, and it is dramatically reenacted in the daily use of the Qur’an in prayer and recitation, which itself becomes a kind of individual ‘‘reascending creation.’’

Another aspect of this intrinsically unifying dimension of Qur’anic Arabic is the fact that Arabic verbs have (in their most common forms) only two possible ‘‘tenses’’: either a
present and continuing
time or a ‘‘past’’ form. In the Qur’an, even the grammatically ‘‘past’’ form commonly expresses the timeless presence of those divine creative Acts—what we call ‘‘the world’’ and all creation—that by their transcendent origin are always simultaneously determined, yet constantly repeated, in the divine Present and God’s ‘‘ever- renewed Creation’’ (Qur’an 10:4, and others). Thus, nothing could more invisibly betray those decisive individual spiritual states and experiences so powerfully evoked by the pervasive eschatological passages of the Qur’an

than the way that English translators typically place these intensely present metaphysical realities into a vague, indeterminate ‘‘future.’’
24

While these grammatical explanations of fundamental Qur’anic structures are mystifying to readers only accustomed to English, we are all familiar with the cinema as another contemporary artistic medium that works with a similar ‘‘presential’’ quality that vividly expresses our inner experience of con- stantly shifting and coexisting perspectives and time. The standard cinematic cues and conventions for expressing internal and external shifts of time and perspective, changing instantly (and without the slightest confusion on the part of the audience) between different ‘‘points’’ within a single all- encompassing reality, are recognizable even to small children. The character- istically cinematic structure and sudden perspective shifts of Qur’anic language and metaphysics, though unfortunately neglected in most English translations, has been unforgettably translated into many of the creative poetic and musical masterpieces of the later Islamic humanities.