Voices of Islam (17 page)

•

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Drunkenness of the Word, you ignite the nations as nothing else can, a flame of

sculpted stars carried from arena to arena, whisper

made by a solitary singer in a vacant lot in the spotlight of the full moon in his

uprise, rung by rung, from trashy mortality, head dazed by successive different colors of halo to the most celestial dimensions until,

eyes just at the level of vaporizing clouds, he catches sight of his goal and is transformed into a fixed aerial body

that comes back singing, and walks through the marketplace buying a pound of figs, a dried fish,

a trowelful of almonds, bunches of bananas and a pot-scraper made of wood-shavings

somehow held together.

In the most windless place, in the shadow of the dunes of doom,

O Word made alive by our pronunciation of you

unawares, you flower all of a sudden into

forests inhabited by prismatic birds whose flight breaks light into the

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Voices of Tradition

primary colors and

spreads their sheen on the broad leaves of our

private pleas!

Word of Love, cry out of desperation, word half-spoken, the other half

caught in the heart,

word like a groundhog checking the length of its shadow before fully

emerging, song, solitude’s antique chorus

that, each time the lips form it, is polished anew and

emerges bronze and perfectly ticking with open face and

solid footing.

We are reversed in our lives until the Word speaks us and faces us forward

into the spray of the cascade of its meaning always coming toward us

from above sea-level where the Source of all words and The Word itself

high atop a tower of Light sends it down fully propelled for the

journey.

8 Ramadan

NOTE

This poem fi t appeared in Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore,
The Ramadan Sonnets
(San Francisco and Bethesda, Maryland: Jusoor/City Lights Books, 1996). Reprinted from Jusoor/City Lights Books and republished in the Ecstatic Exchange Series. This poem is reproduced here by permission of the author.

6
‌

E
NCOUNTERING THE
Q
UR
’
AN
: C
ONTEXTS AND
A
PPROACHES

•

James Winston Morris

Virtually nothing that one may encounter in the great high-cultural achievements of Islamic civilization, or within the hundreds of distinctive localized Muslim cultures, can be fully understood without a profound knowledge of the Qur’an and the multitude of ways it has been understood and interpreted. Indeed most of the Islamic humanities, in all their end- lessly creative and evolving manifestations, can be understood as efforts to communicate effectively and to translate into realized human form, the teachings and unique forms of the Arabic Qur’an. Against this vast historical panorama, the purpose of this chapter is more modest: to prepare interested lay readers, with access only to a single reliable English version of the Qur’an and to a few essential reference works, to begin to explore and appreciate those dimensions of the Arabic Qur’an that have so constantly shaped and colored the manifold forms of Islamic cultures and civilization.

The contexts, cautions, and practical guidelines that are briefl outlined in this chapter are based on several decades of accumulated experience in introducing the Qur’an to English-speaking audiences, primarily young uni- versity students interested in Religious Studies and different world-religious traditions. What this experience has repeatedly taught me is that the greatest obstacles to any serious appreciation of the Qur’an on its own terms and in traditional Islamic cultural contexts usually come from a shared body of unconscious, normally taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about the nature, language, and assumed uses of the translated English Bible (and hence of ‘‘scripture’’ in general). The unconscious assumptions that guide novice readers—and too often English translators of the Qur’an as well—are rooted in a set of very specific formative historical experiences and implicit concep- tions of religion that is shared by Anglo-Saxon (and mostly Protestant) cultures in North America and elsewhere. For the same reason, Muslim

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Voices of Tradition

translators of the Qur’an into English have so far, almost without exception, continued to pay little attention to the ‘‘receiving’’ role of the relevant mentalities and to the assumptions of their non-Muslim audiences in the process of communication.
1

The Arabic Qur’an is different in a number of fundamental ways from everything that non-Muslim English readers normally associate with reading ‘‘a book.’’ Equally important, the Arabic Qur’an continues to be present and to function in the lives of the vast majority of Muslims—just as it has throughout the past millennium or more—in specifi ways that are often strikingly different compared with English-speaking readers, who tend to associate with the normal approaches to the English Bible. For these reasons, I begin by briefly outlining some of the most important contexts in which the Arabic Qur’an remains present in the lives and experiences of Muslims everywhere. These contexts are normally private and familial (hence socially invisible) for Muslims in Western cultures, but they are often more public wherever Muslims are historically a majority or signifi minority of the population. I then suggest ways in which students can begin to move from a reliable English translation of the Qur’an toward a deeper appreciation of the complex meanings actually conveyed by the original Arabic.

THE PRESENCE OF THE QUR’AN

The root meaning of the word
Qur’an,
as it has historically been under- stood, is ‘‘recitation,’’ and the weight of historical evidence likewise suggests that the oral recitation of the revelations of the Qur’an, from the very beginning, formed an essential part of the liturgical acts of personal and communal prayers in Islam. This was certainly the primary context of use and transmission of the Qur’an prior to the subsequent efforts of recording, collection, codifi and the even longer evolution of the current forms of Arabic orthography. Hence the recited and
aural
presence of the Qur’an—whether in the ritual prayer or in a host of other contexts— has remained the primary way in which Muslims have initially encountered the Holy Book, whether or not they can actually understand and interpret the Arabic vocabulary of the Qur’an. This is true above all for non- Arabic-speaking Muslims, who have formed the great majority of Muslims throughout the world since at least the twelfth century of the Common Era.
2
Because this aural, quasi-musical dimension of the Qur’an as recita- tion is so fundamental, and since recordings of excellent Qur’an reciters are now readily available in all digital media and over the Internet, no one who can access good-quality recitations should begin to read an English translation of the Qur’an without first listening at length to a range of different reciters and forms of recitation.
3
I have repeatedly witnessed

Encountering the Qur’an
67

among students of many ages and cultural backgrounds that the immediate power and effectiveness of the properly recited Qur’an is palpable to anyone, often to the point of spontaneous tears, as the Qur’an itself notes (Qur’an 5:83).
4
For the beginning student otherwise limited to an English translation of the Qur’an, the awakened awareness of this immedi- ately accessible, hauntingly memorable dimension of the Qur’an is a potent antidote to the repeated obstacles and misunderstandings faced by anyone who then goes on to explore those versions of the Qur’an that are so far available in English.

Hearing the Qur’an

Traditionally, a small but symbolically key portion of the Qur’an (either the
Basmalla
or
Surat al-Fatiha
)
5
is the first thing spoken into the ear of a newborn Muslim baby and the last thing heard by someone dying. This audible presence of the spoken or recited Qur’an carries on through the whole life cycle of ritual and liturgical occasions outlined below. However, the highly public nature of many of these liturgical occasions in predomi- nantly Muslim cultures means that the recited Qur’an tends to become a virtually omnipresent public background even for everyday, nonliturgical life. This fact is true to an almost equal extent even in most non-Arabic Muslim areas of the world, from West Africa to Indonesia or the Hui Muslim neigh- borhoods of China’s cities. Indeed, the recent mass availability of electronic and digital media has meant that recorded forms of the recited Qur’an are now almost universally accessible and audible anywhere one goes in the Islamic world: from public markets, a taxi driver’s cassette or CD player,

various portable media players, and dedicated television channels (now on local cable outlets in the West) to the selections of Qur’an recitation normally available on the airlines of every Muslim country. Thus, in recent years, the audible presence of the Arabic Qur’an has expanded far beyond its traditional liturgical contexts.

In addition, the centrality of the actual sounds and rhythms of the Qur’an is mirrored in diverse local forms of music, poetry, and rhythmic recitation that are often included under the central Qur’anic rubric of
dhikr,
the infi nitely varied prayerful ‘‘recollection, remembrance and repetition’’ of the divine Reality. Forms of
dhikr
are included almost everywhere among the preeminent forms of the local Islamic humanities, both in popular and in more learned, elite contexts.
6
Whether in Arabic or in other Islamic lan- guages such as Persian or Urdu, the richly innovative forms of spiritual music and poetry are inseparable from the constant archetypal inspirations—both symbolic and more concretely poetic and rhythmic—of the aural Qur’an, often in ways that are so self-evident that they remain virtually unconscious among the cultures concerned.

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Voices of Tradition

Seeing the Qur’an: The Sacred Presence of the Arabic Script

Throughout history, the assimilation of Islam within a new cultural or lin- guistic context has been marked by the practice of writing the local language in the sacred Arabic script of the Qur’an. This process has provided a kind of consonantal shorthand that has been adapted for more than 30 different lan- guages. One of the bases of this phenomenon was the insistence of Muslim parents on creating locally adapted primary Qur’an schools (
maktab
) or tutoring facilities for very young children (primary age or even younger). These schools provided an initiation into the recitation of at least the minimal number of Qur’anic verses needed to perform the ritual prayers, along with some basic skills in writing and recognizing the sacred Arabic text. This initia- tion normally occurred at an age before what were, until very recently, the demanding and expensive processes of formal instruction and full literacy in Qur’anic Arabic or the written forms of the local vernacular languages.
7
Thus, in many areas outside of the Arab world, the recent introduction of alternative (Romanized or Cyrillic) alphabets by colonial or modern reform- ist powers, or even the outright suppression of formal Islamic education under Communist regimes, has gone hand-in-hand with the elimination of this once widespread proto-literacy in the basic elements of Qur’anic Arabic. Despite these negative developments, the visual presence of the Arabic sacred alphabet of the Qur’an has remained important everywhere Muslims live. Some of the most familiar public manifestations of Qur’anic Arabic are in architectural settings, since most public buildings were funded by religious foundations until very recent times. Mosques, schools, tombs, shrines, hospi- tals, kitchens for the poor, and places of pilgrimage are filled with calligraphy and tiled versions of the divine names, invocations, and passages of the Qur’an. The same visual and symbolic imagery is also reflected, in tribal and domestic contexts, in prayer rugs and other carpets and textile arts. At a deeper and often more religiously signifi level, the visual and symbolic (including literary) iconography of the traditional Islamic humanities is thor-