Earlier this fall I was honored by my University’s Muslims Student Association and the Minnesota Dawah Institute when they let me engage their community, as a secular student interested in Islamic studies, in exploring out different understanding about the Qur’an. My respectful counterpart was brother Faruq Kaase, a well known personality on my campus and an avid debater with the local Christian community. You can see him hold forth on the Qur’an and the Bible here:
One of the messages I wanted to get across (and I’m unsure that I was able to effectively communicate this) was that to the person outside of Islam, you can’t get Islam from the Qur’an. Just like you can’t get Mormonism from just the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price, Judaism from the Tanakh, nor any form of Christianity from the Holy Bible. I mentioned this because when a Muslim has a friend ask them about their faith in attempt to learn more, one of the first things a well intentioned Muslim does is give their friend a Qur’an. This usually frustrates more than helps, because unknown to most Americans, the Qur’an is not ordered in a chronological fashion and the text doesn’t provide context clues that biblical narratives so often give. So the uninitiated friend is reading a book that confounds them because they can’t figure what is going on and the project is abandoned long before any real study has taken place.
This also poses problems for Muslims as well and I tried to point out to Faruq that even his beliefs can stray from the text of the Qur’an. The example I used was from Surah 54 (1-2):
The Hour is at hand and the moon is split. And if they see a sign they turn aside and say: transient enchantment.
The majority of Muslims around the world believe these specific passages refers to a literal event, that the moon actually split as a sign from God. While I won’t try to convince any Muslim that they shouldn’t believe this, I will point out that nothing in the text of the Qur’an indicates that the event spoken of here was literal.
The vocabulary of the passage indicates a non-literal understanding. Looking at the verb “inshaqqa” seems to suggest a figurative understanding, that the splitting of the moon isn’t happening as the words of Surah 52 are being spoken by the Prophet, but that the splitting of the moon is to announce the eschaton, Day of Judgement. Consider 69:19 where it states “…heaven shall be split, for on that day it shall be frail” the verb there is “wa-’nshaqqat”. Or 84:1 we see “inshaqqat” or in 25:25 it is “tashaqqaqu” and in 55:37 “inshaqqat”. It seems the Day of Judgement cannot be described without verbal forms coming from the SH-Q-Q root.
I think perhaps more telling is that the word “aya” (sign) help defines what this splitting of the moon means. Basically “aya” is a natural sign that are pointed out to emphasize the power of Allah over nature as its creator. Surah 16 calls the rain needed to make seeds grow for a bountiful harvest an “aya” for all who can understand. This is not a word used for the miraculous, or events that contradict the settled order of nature, which is exactly the kind of thing the Prophet’s enemies wanted before they forced him to flee from Mecca.
That fact is always fascinating to me, that in the text of the Qur’an, the Prophet’s humanity is stressed. In Surah 29 the Prophet states, “The signs are only with Allah, and I am only a plain warner (nadhir mubin)” The Prophet cannot produce miracles because the Qur’an states that the Prophet is just a “bashar”, flesh and blood (17:93, 41:6). On the other hand, after the Prophet’s death when his biography was assembled, it would seem the Prophet lived a very enchanted life, with the miraculous becoming more common than not.
When making this point to my Muslim friends, I like to remind them that I stand within a firm tradition found within the early tafsir (exegesis of the Qur’an) traditions. ‘Abd al-Razzaq recorded in his Musannaf a tradition that goes back to the Medinan mawla of Ibn ‘Abbas, Ikrima ( 723 C.E.) He relates that the moon was eclipsed and when people were remarking that a spell had been cast on the moon, the Prophet recited the first verse of surah 54.
The lesson learned here is an important one you learn in Religious Studies, you don’t know a religion from its text alone. The issue really isn’t that my understanding of a certain Qur’anic passage is better than someone else’s, but that the living breathing faith on the street, in the home, and at the University cannot be understood just by its scriptures alone. Human beings are far too complex for that.
