ContemporaryCriticalPractices and the Qur’ān
Contemporary methodology operative in the study of the Qur’ān, especially in the West, and the philosophical and epistemological questions and problems related to the study of the Qur’ān in its function as the focal point of a religion and a religious tradition. See also post-enlightment pre-occupations of qur’ānic study.
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Introduction: The ranking of rational processes
Reason no longer offers the certainty it once did; only philosophers still adhere to ¶ the primacy of critical reflection in the implicitly or explicitly assumed hierarchy of approaches (l'ordre des raisons) in every cognitive construction. The social sciences continue to produce their own isolated critical approaches to knowledge, the result being a reduction of epistemological exchange and confrontation and the rise of what J. Derrida calls teletechnoscientific reason, a disjointed conglomerate that claims to be the only reliable form of thinking in current scholarly discourse. On the other hand, P. Bourdieu has recently presented a trenchant criticism of scholastic reason (in Méditations pascaliennes), which is nevertheless unlikely to elicit any fruitful response from the great figures of the scholarly world since it is the systematic spread of this very scholastic reason on which their reputation has been based and continues to depend.
Every scholar lives within the confines of a speciality which can become a private kingdom, and thus strives to establish certain aims which lack any real basis, in order to publicize assumptions of meaning (effets de sens) or representations of them. These, in turn, are presented under the guise of meaning or truth as established by a scientific method and as recognized by the community of scholars. According to J.F. Lyotard, “Scientific reason is not questioned according to the criterion of (cognitive) truth or falsehood on the message/referent axis, but according to its (pragmatical) performative abilities on the messenger/recipient axis” (L'enthousiasme, 15).
European modernity, at least since the eighteenth century, has left us with the impression that reason would finally be liberated from the constraints of dogmatism for the service of knowledge alone, once a radical separation between every church and the “neutral” state was accomplished. When this latter body is free to exercise an undisputed sovereignty, it does not, how-¶ ever, struggle with the same determination for such a radical separation between cognitive freedom and its own aims and rationality. This is not the place to explore this subject further; it is enough to recall now that in various Islamic contexts, reason multiplies the constraints which it had itself created for the sake of its initial independence in the face of the strict control of the state, a state which unilaterally proclaims itself the exclusive administrator of orthodox religious truth (q.v.).
Such are the two contexts in which the Qur’ān has been read, consulted and interpreted for fourteen centuries on the Muslim side and for some two centuries on the side of the modern West. This introduction of a hierarchy of approaches makes the debate on orientalism irrelevant as it has hitherto been conducted, i.e. apart from any preliminary critique, apart from scholastic reason (as defined above), and apart from recognition of the fact that cognitive reason has willingly accepted this utilitarian, pragmatic, teletechnoscientific reason. One must, however, remember two troublesome issues for the Western scholar of the Qur’ān who continues to be influenced by the tools and assumptions of a positivist and philological methodology: (1) With the exception of a handful of scholars who have had no lasting influence, all qur’ānic scholars have little regard for any methodological debate and reject, if they are not actually unaware of, questions of an epistemological nature. They are only sensitive to discussing the “facts” according to the meaning and in the cognitive framework which they themselves have chosen. (2) Apart from specialists who are themselves believers and bring their Jewish or Christian theological culture to bear on the question at hand, all who declare themselves agnostic, atheist or simply secular dodge the question of meaning in religious discourse and thus refuse to enter ¶ into a discussion of the content of faith (q.v.), not as a set of life rules to be internalized by every believer, but as a psycho-linguistic, social and historical edifice. Hence the essential question about truth, for religious reason as well as that of the most critical philosphical kind, remains totally absent in the so-called scientific study of a corpus of texts of which the raison d'être — the ultimate goal to which all rhetorical and linguistic utterances bear witness — consists in providing for its immediate addressees, who have multiplied and succeeded one another throughout the centuries, the unique, absolute and intangible criterion of Truth as a True Being, a True Reality and a True Sense of Right (al-Ḥaqq). Yet surely, this Ḥaqq has from the time it was first anounced orally between 610 and 632 c.e. until today developed in a way which history and cultural sociology must be willing to investigate and explain.
This is not a question of establishing the true meaning of texts as lived by the faithful, i.e. as sacred and revealed nor is it a matter of articulating the certitudes recorded in a long process of sacralization, transcendentalization, ontologization, spiritualization, etc., and systematized in the great products of theological, philosophical, legal or historiographical thought inherited from the Middle Ages. Rather, the task of the contemporary researcher is to problematize all systems which claim to produce meaning, all the forms, still existent or not, which offer meaning and assumptions of meaning. This is an essential distinction that encompasses many problems yet to be raised or, if they have been, only poorly or without full recognition. In the study of the Qur’ān and similar corpuses in other cultures — comparison must always be utilized — the scholar approaches the activity of the human spirit that most closely expresses its own utopian vision, its hopes, both ¶ those which are unfulfilled and those which recur, its struggle to push back the limits of its servitude and to attain the full exercise of its “will to know,” combined with its critical and creative freedom. The theme in the case of the qur’ānic corpus and its vast historical development is to test the capacity of reason to decipher the mysteries which it has itself produced.
Despite this shared reference to a utopian vision, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that contemporary qur’ānic studies lag considerably behind biblical studies to which it must always be compared (see scripture and the qur’ān). This lag could be said to reflect the different concerns that emerged in the historical development of societies in which the Qur’ān continues to play the role of ultimate and absolute reference point and in which it has never been replaced as the sole criterion for the definition and function of all true, legitimate and legal value. In the violent and passionate rejection of what political Islam calls “the West,” the stakes lie less in the seizure of an ephemeral power than in the progress of the secular model of historical production which could ultimately render the “divine” model obsolete, as it has already done in the West. This point is important for any attempt to liberate the problematic of the Qur’ān from its isolation vis-à-vis the historical perspective of modernity as well as for any effort to address the religious problem, which has been at one and the same time appropriated by and disqualified by this political concern. The context is also essential for clarifying the strategy of mediating a solution and thus guiding the pedagogy of the reflective researcher (chercheur-penseur).
During the years of struggle for political independence (1945-1970), one could have hoped that an opening toward modern historical criticism as shown in the Middle East and North Africa during the so-called ¶ Renaissance (Nahḍa, 1830-1940), would have grown to incorporate subjects as taboo as qur’ānic studies, including the sacralised areas of law appropriated by the sharī`a and its legal statutes and rulings (see law and the qur’ān), the corpus of ḥadīths (see ḥadīth and the qur’ān) which enjoy the status of fundamental source (aṣl) as defined by al-Shāfi`ī (d. 204/820). Certain historical events, however, altered this potential course, beginning with the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and its eventual global enlargement by so-called fundamentalist movements. This revived, in the already very complex and inadequately explored area of qur’ānic studies, the rather archaic combination of the violent and the sacred, a combination that was still able, with some effect, to bring its weight to bear upon the global civilization of disenchantment, desacralization and the supremacy of sciences over all dimensions of human reality. In order to enrich the questions of the social sciences and to radicalize their criticism in every area, including, of course, modernity, the reflective researcher must bear in mind the historical, sociological and psychological significance of the religious imagination. This is a reality which the assumptions of scientific socialism and militant secularism of the French kind believed it was possible to eradicate through teaching official atheism or through eliminating the concept of the religious event (fait religieux) from an educational system run by a state that self-proclaimed its neutrality. By agreeing to work within such assumptions, the social sciences have contributed to nourishing and even legitimizing recurrent wars between the forces, demographically in the majority, that support sacrality and sacralization and the so-called enlightened who support a rational process thought to be emancipatory. But this process actually has a hegemonic mission, since it continues to ¶ spread pragmatic truths while refusing to think philosophically about what is intolerable in relations between humans, cultures and civilizations (cf. Arkoun, Les sciences sociales).
Like Christians during the modernist crisis of the nineteenth century, Muslims have reacted — and still react — against earlier works marked by historicist-philologist positivism as well as against more recent research that is relatively free of the assumption of a triumphalist, even intolerant science. Under the pretext of not wanting to confuse different kinds of science, so-called pure researchers refuse to address the conflict between full-blown scientific reason and religious reason that is apparently vanquished intellectually or forced on the defensive despite its historical persistence. This refusal continues despite the many possible applications of an epistemological radicalization of the social sciences. These “pure” researchers steadfastly refuse to integrate theological reasoning — despite its popular persistence — into a methodological program for an epistemology of historical research (épistémologie historique) which could include all aspects and dimensions of reason and its products and in which relations between religious, philosophical and scientific reason could be examined. They also prefer simply to ignore even the mere suggestion of cooperation with a reflective researcher since he or she is dismissed as speculative and unable to respect particular evidence (which does, unfortunately, often happen) rather than as a rigorous academic committed to the establishment of facts. A necessary correction to this narrow perspective would mean moving toward the use of historical psychology, historical sociology and historical anthropology for vast territories of the past, long ignored by the historian interested in narration, description and taxonomy. The recently published work of ¶ J. van Ess (Theologie und Gesellschaft) shows all the richness of which we have been deprived and points to what will potentially escape into the future.
As a rather marginal academic discipline, the history of religions is looked at askance by both theological authorities, guardians of orthodoxy, and by secular states which propagate a political “neutrality” yet to be adequately examined philosophically and anthropologically. Furthermore, this field remains uncertain of its precise scope since it spills into many other disciplines. The same uncertainty applies to its intended objects of study which largely involve the invisible, the untouchable, the unnamable, the supernatural, the miraculous, the mysterious, the sacred, the holy, hope, love, violence and so on, as well as its instruments, analytical framework and inevitable relation to other disciplines, themselves groping their way forward in the dark. There is another rarely mentioned fact about the history of religions: Specialists writing for their colleagues are fully aware of the academic constraints by which they will be judged and admitted to the profession or excluded from it, no less differently than theologians who must practice self-censorship in order to obtain the imprimatur of doctrinal authorities. In any case, the populace at large, long confined to the discourse of oral culture, does not appear in scholarly writing, although they are the most directly concerned addressee of this research and form by far the largest and most convinced bloc of consumers of systems of belief and non-belief which science has submitted to its examination. Medieval élites (khāṣṣa) already taught openly that the masses (`awāmm) should be kept away from scholarly debates. Today it is left to the scorned popularizers of knowledge to transmit to a large audience bits and pieces of a highly specialized science. The distinctive feature of religion, ¶ however, is that it is a source of inspiration, hope and legitimatization for all and first of all for those who have not received instruction in critical thought. In the case of the contemporary Muslim world, this observation bears considerably on qur’ānic studies.
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Reading the Qur’ān today
As far as what is commonly called the Qur’ān is concerned, it must be said that this term has become so heavily laden by theological inquiry and the practical goals of secular approaches that it must be subjected to a preliminary deconstruction in order to make manifest levels of function and significance that have been side-stepped, suppressed or forgotten by pious tradition as well as by text-oriented philology. As is well-known, this situation has a long history, extending from the moment the Qur’ān was written down through its centuries of propagation in manuscript form until its modern-day dissemination in print, an historical process which has encouraged the rise of the clerical class to political and intellectual power. The present conceptual burden of the term Qur’ān is at odds with the social and cultural conditions prevailing at the time of the emergence and growth of that which the initial qur’ānic discourse calls Qur’ān, the celestial Text (al-Kitāb, see book), recited as a faith event, aloud and before an audience. This annunciation can be called prophetic discourse and establishes an arena of communication between three grammatical persons: a speaker who articulates the discourse contained in the celestial Text; a first addressee, who transmits the message of annunciation as a faith event; and a second addressee, the people (al-nās), who constitute the group, large or small according to the circumstances, whose members are nevertheless all equal and free in their status as addressee. They are equal because they share the same discourse situation, i.e. ¶ access to the same oral language used in the annunciation of the message. They are free because they respond immediately by assent, understanding, rejection, refutation or the demand for further explanation. More will be said about the crucial importance of the psycho-socio-linguistic analysis of what will henceforth be called prophetic discourse. (Justification will be given for the use of this qualification of “prophetic,” which, historically, is strongly contested by the first addressee, after the adage that “no one is a prophet in his own country.”) It must be remembered that all orientalist scholarship, in limiting itself to the curiosities of the task of a philological restoration of the text (grammar, morphology, lexicography, syntax) along with an historical reconstruction of the simple facts, has ignored the concepts of the structure of relations between persons (Benvéniste), of the discourse situation as conditioned by its context (as described by P. Zumptor for medieval literature by use of the term orature after the French écriture, “writing”), and of the dialectic between the powerful and the weak (dialectique des puissances et des résidus). This last-mentioned encompasses the interaction between orature and écriture, knowledge of the structure of myth and critical historical knowledge, in other words the functional solidarity among 1) the centralizing program of state education, 2) écriture, 3) the scholarly milieu and the clerics who produce and manage it, and 4) orthodoxy. Thus, four dynamic socio-historical forces can be seen to be dialectically related to four other forces in the social arena which appear universally, as in Mecca (q.v.) and Medina (q.v.) at the time of the emergence of the qur’ānic event (fait coranique) no less than in the social milieu of the contemporary nation-state: 1) segmented society which defies uniformity, 2) orature, 3) culture which is called popular and disintegrates into popu-¶ list culture in the contemporary megalopolis, and 4) heterodoxies. This interconnected conceptual framework allows an integration of all levels at which qur’ānic discourse functions — linguistic, social, anthropological, along with all historical periods — into the project of analysis and interpretation. This is demonstrated in a reading of q 9, Sūrat al-Tawba (Arkoun).