THE QURAN AS A GREAT BOOK: MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES
Lecture presented at

Hofstra Great Books Series, December 5, 1993

Daniel Martin Varisco

Daniel.M.Varisco@hofstra.edu

[Read fatiha]
What I have just recited in Arabic is the Quran's opening or fatiha, consisting only of seven short verses, the first of some 114 chapters of varying length. This is the most oft repeated part of the Quran, recited daily by millions of Muslim men and women during each of the five regular prayers. So integral are these opening words in the revelation of Islam that they have been called the "essence" (literally "mother") of the Quran (Umm al-Quran ), or as some say, "the Lord's Prayer of the Muslims." This fatiha is the opening salvo of a scripture revered as God's most basic message by perhaps one billion people on earth today. For these Muslims, most of whom live outside the Middle East, the Arabic Quran is not only a great book but quite literally the great book. While non-believers would not approach this book as a true revelation, no one can deny that it is a scripture that has been influential in shaping history across continents for almost 15 centuries and will continue to influence the lives and politics of many of the world's peoples for a long time to come.
My interest tonight in talking about the Quran differs somewhat from most of the lectures in this series. I feel no need to convince you as an audience in an academic setting that the Quran is a significant text, one of those few great books that we cannot afford to ignore. This is made even more poignant in light of the perceived threat by many in our society of a so-called "militant" Islam on the march against Western Civilization. In our collective cultural ignorance, the Quran is portrayed only as a manifesto, not because non-believers ever take the time to read it but simply because Islam has been branded as a hostile and uncompromising worldview.
I am not an apologist for Islam, and if I were this would hardly be an appropriate forum to try and convert you to a religion that is arguably more misunderstood and belittled than the other fashionable monotheisms we know about. Nor do I wish to stand here in the guise of a well-intentioned, dispassionate, outside observer of a religious and intellectual tradition I was not born into nor bred up in, even though I have interacted with this tradition enthusiastically over the course of two decades. I am not interested in laying out a critical assessment of the Quran as a literary text -- deconstructing a revelation as anything other than a revelation. The Quran as literature would only make sense with a focus on the "Arabic" text; in this I totally agree with the Muslim perspective that the Quran can never be properly translated out of Arabic. All such "translations" are but shadows to any Muslim without the vitality and force of the original. There can be no "King James Version" of the Islamic holy book. I am certainly not one whit motivated to attack the authenticity of the Quran, to argue either ethnocentrically that it is a poor hand-me-down copy of the Judaeo-Christian scriptural lineage, nor to engage in an exegetical exercise to ferret out myth textually in that peculiar academic penchant for defining real truth as historical truth.
So why am I here?
Let me begin with my discipline. I am an anthropologist by training and experience and a life-long student of Arabic (as a dynamic language and as an extraordinary corpus of folklore and formal literature). You may wonder why an anthropologist would stand before you to discuss a great book, an anthropologist who should seem to be more at home studying primitive, non-literate people (who can sadly boast of no "great books".. Perhaps we should have a "Great Oral Traditions" series).
You see, as an anthropologist, I do not so readily discriminate between societies with books and societies technically without them. More specifically, as a cultural anthropologist, my ethnographic research (that is, my personal observations and documentation of what people do, say they do, or don't do and think they should do) was in the Arab Islamic country of Yemen (located southwest of Saudi Arabia across the horn of Africa from more newsworthy Somalia). While many of the Yemeni men and women I knew in the field were not formally literate, they were clearly part and parcel of a religion of the book; as Muslims with an impressive local history they all related to the Quran as a vital text and they all (even if unschooled) knew by heart portions of the Quran, at a minimum the fatiha I recited at the start. To talk meaningfully about the Yemen I observed and studied and not to know something reasonably substantial about the Quran that Yemenis revere, would seem to me absurd, or at the very least the sloppiest sort of scholarship.
As an anthropologist I have a natural (at least it seems natural to me) inclination to look at a great book (the Quran, for instance) not by its cover or its contents alone, but by the way in which it informs people's lives and thoughts. The question that interests me most tonight is not why the Quran is a great book, nor why those outside of the Islamic milieu should see it as such, but rather how Muslims see this greatness and act upon it.
The obvious caveat, of course, is that there is no one Muslim way of viewing the Quran, just as there is no one Jewish way of viewing the Torah, nor one Christian way of viewing the New Testament. None of these three sibling monotheisms is monolithic, a point often obscured by our ignorance of the theisms we are not born into, but certainly not justified by such lack of experience. The Quran can mean many things to those who must come to terms with it as revelation, depending on differing historical and cultural contexts, as well as personal idiosyncracies. This caveat is hardly a revelation in itself, and hopefully not the main point you will remember from this lecture. But periodically we must restate the obvious in order to establish why it is not obvious to everyone.
Given the general ignorance in American society of Islam, especially the theology based on the teachings in the Quran, it is important to go back to the beginning, the essence, the opening, the words that are by definition significant to all Muslims. This eloquent key, the fatiha , can initially open up for us tonight a preliminary appreciation of how Muslims look at their great book. After the fatiha , I will examine in brief some of the principles of Quranic interpretation by one of the most devout religious scholars in the history of Islam. I refer to Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-`Arabi, who lived some six centuries ago, a pious Muslim who believed as fervently as the simplest and unschooled and yet an intellectual, philosopher, and scholar of the highest rank.
Following this, I will return quite precipitously to the present, to a controversy that has polarized Muslims apart from the "West" more than any other event in recent years. And a controversy, I will argue, that can best be understood on the basis of how Muslims treat their Great Book as great differently than we in the West treat (or perhaps more accurately, treated) our's. My remarks are primarily directed at non-Muslims in the audience. Were I speaking solely to a community of believers, this discourse would assuredly not take the present form, cover the same well-traveled ground, nor be motivated by the same goals.
But let us return to the beginning, the opening of the great book before us.
"In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful"
For the Muslim all things begin in the name of God. The prophet Muhammad urged his followers to say this phrase at the start of any activity, such as the beginning of a meal, the start of a trip, or even (by extension) for beginning a lecture such as I did tonight. The essence of God's name, literally the first two words in the Quran, is summed up by the 99 beautiful names (al-asma' al-husna) which define the various attributes of God. Yet of all these attributes, the two most structually significant are the two recited here. God is rahman (Compassionate) and God is rahim (Merciful). The first refers to God's all-embracing beneficence, what God gives to humanity out of love and affection despite human foibles; the second refers to the divine mercy that flows after the appropriate human submission, effort and prayer. To recite this phrase is to remind yourself that God has mercy, no matter how bad you are or how good you appear to be in others' eyes. This reminds us that the ultimate message of the Quran is moral; as a revelation it's like a deep personal letter written from a concerned parent to a child. Unlike the Torah or Christian Bible as a whole, this book does not yield a stringent legal code, nor does it create a sacred history of the world, nor does it record in boring meticulousness the genealogical links that justify past and future prophets. It is quite simply a message to get with it from a God whose main attribute is mercy.
1. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds
If there is a phrase in Arabic as frequently used as the bismillah, it is no doubt the hamdillah. Since God is perfect, God alone has the right to receive praise from humanity. God deserves this verbal praise because this mercy comes of his own volition; it was not forced, it was freely given. We are also reminded in these opening words that God rules; he is the rabb of the worlds that be. The word rabb in Arabic has a number of related connotations, including master or lord, chief, determiner, provider, sustainer, rewarder, and perfector. The worlds, perhaps better rendered straightforwardly as the universe, indicated here encompass the material and the immaterial, of flesh-and-blood and of spirits, of those who are well guided and those who are misguided. Whatever is, God is the ultimate master of it. While a non-believer might read this as a base for fatalism, a Muslim sees it differently as a fundamental reason for hope. God's will will be done, but this hardly frees the believer from doing his or her part, particularly when no one can speak definitively as to what God's will is in a given matter. The meaning of Islam, after all, is submission.
2. The Compassionate, the Merciful
3. Master of the Day of Judgement
The term malik is that which is used in Arabic for the master of a slave, the owner of property, and the king or sole ruler. For the Muslim, God is the ultimate master of all things. He is not just a judge dispensing justice; God renders reward and punishment (the implication of judgement day) because He alone is the authentic source for such judgement. Who else has this kind of authority, but the one who creates everything and sustains everything? We are reminded quite literally as well that Islam preaches a final judgement, one beyond the grave, a future resurrection of the dead -- an idea hardly unique to this revelation. But the Muslim is consoled by the realization that no matter how bad things are (and in many Muslim countries, things are pretty bad right now) God will be the ultimate judge.
4. You alone we worship, and to you alone we pray for help
Muhammad was the messenger of a strict monotheism: there could be only one all-knowing, all-powerful God -- Allah in Arabic. Not surprisingly Muslims find the Christian notion of trinity -- that God could be divided into three divine persons -- as heresy. It is one of those interesting ironies of history that some of the major arguments used by medieval Christian scholars for the oneness of God are borrowed from Islamic theology, as Prof. Makdisi of my alma mater (University of Pennsylvania) has shown in several well-documented studies. Indeed Makdisi's lifelong analysis of the work of the Baghdadi scholar Ibn `Aqil (died 1119 AD) shows the direct influence of medieval Muslim methods of disputation on the "scholastic method" of St. Aquinas.
Like the other kindred monotheisms, the God of Islam is a jealous God. Islam does not tolerate any sort of worship we might define as "pagan." Jews and Christians, as well as Mazdeans from Iran -- the so-called "people of the book" -- were allowed to continue their religions because Muhammad preached that they worshipped the same God, although, given the new revelation of the Quran, in error. A jealous but merciful God could accept an inept believer, but not a non-believer. Hence, Muslims are rather uncomfortable with any worldview which admits the possibility that no God exists. The issue of doubt, which is the hallmark of secularism in the West, has not arisen to a recognizable form in Islamic tradition
One of the central forms of worship in Islam is prayer, not the pray-when-you-have-a-need variety but rather a discipline of five daily prayers (even if these appear to inconvenience the worshipper), communal Friday prayers, and a variety of directed prayers for ritual occasions. For the Western observer, it is perhaps the physical exercise of prayer which most sets Muslims apart. They not only submit in spirit, but also prostrate their bodies in unison as a daily public demonstration of their faith. It is no surprise then that televised sound bites on Islam invariably show a scene of such prayer -- a none too subtle semiotic message that Muslims worship blindly in a mass submission as opposed to the rigid individualism of Western religious expression in a secularized framework. What is not seen -- because it cannot be properly shown in the media -- is that most Muslim prayer and indeed most recitations of the fatiha occur in private, the individual alone approaching his God.
5 Guide us to the straight path.
6. The path of those whom you have favoured
7. Not of those who have incurred your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray.
To reach God the Muslim must find the right path, as shown to the prophet Muhammad and revealed through the revelation in the Quran. In the spiritual journey metaphor as mentioned in the Christian Gospel of St. Matthew the road to destruction is broad and entered through a wide gate, while the way to eternal life is contrasted as narrow and less used. The implication in this Christian reading is that most people seek the main street, where the crowds go, a not surprising travel itinerary for a religion which starts with original sin. In Islam, by contrast, sin is not the same black mark on Adam's progeny. For the Muslim, the straight path is the clearly marked trail, without detours and confusing curves, the road which is known to go to a certain destination. The start of this straight path is, as the commentator Ibn Kathir notes, the Quran itself. The path is the truth. The goal is to get to and stay on the right path and not be led astray through the willful intent of others nor by accident. The wiles of the Devil notwithstanding, this goal is not outside human reach. God certainly helps believers help themselves, but believers are not clones manipulated by the divine spirit. There is a clearly marked road to follow.
The Devout Scholar and the Text

In Islam there have been and continue to be both conservative and radical "theologians," those whose wisdom almost anyone can benefit from and those who leave for posterity mainly the marks of their own highly strictured ignorance, mystics who dare to see beyond the literalist trap imposed by an all-too-human language and unthinking clerics who cling to tradition for little more than tradition's sake.

From the wide array of Islamic scholars, it would be impossible to say who has been the wisest, the most respected, the most influential. But certainly on the short list we would find Muhyi al-Din Muhammad Ibn al-`Arabi, an extraordinarily well-traveled man of the late 12th and early 13th centuries A.D. Born in Islamic Spain, he traveled that seemingly vast symbolic distance across the Mediterranean Sea to Tunis, made the pilgrimage to Mecca (Islam's sacred capital) in 1202, and after traveling throughout the central lands of the Islamic Empire, eventually settled in Damascus, where he became a highly respected teacher for the last eighteen years of his life. He himself had studied with over 90 masters and produced (we are told) an estimated 700 distinct texts (some 400 of which are still preserved), several of which could rightly qualify in this series as "great books" in their own right. His magnum opus, called Futuhat al-makkiya (The Meccan Openings) is a vast encyclopaedia of Islamic knowledge and Quranic interpretation; it would cover perhaps some 17,000 pages in a formal published edition
An intellectual and mystic of considerable sophistication, Ibn al-`Arabi is, as Bill Chittick (of SUNY Stony Brook) puts it, "squarely in the mainstream of Islam" in that he bases all his teachings on the Quran first, followed by the collected traditions or sayings (called hadith ) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Ibn al-`Arabi's fundamentals in Islamic faith are about as "fundamental" as you can get. For this scholar the Muslim does not doubt the literal meaning of the Quran as God's words; this is not regarded as a serious option. Moreover, despite the occasional rhetorical exchange engendered by the crusading Europeans, most Muslims of his day never encountered anyone who did not take the Quran as a revelation. It is hard for those of us who take for granted a modern secular framework in which doubt is endemic to admit that there were indeed contexts (and still are) where the vexing issue within a society or religious tradition was not belief versus unbelief, but perhaps more accurately more intense belief as compared to less intense belief
For the philosopher Ibn al-`Arabi, it is not common sense, nor is it scientific reasoning, nor is there rationalism in the restrictive Western philosophical sense, when the Muslim comes to the Quran. The fatiha is not an accident, for after all it is God who "opens" up the believer's understanding to see something new or to see beyond what is apparent, all the while preserving the literal sense of the Quran as revealed in God's own Arabic. Faith for the Muslim, this being necessarily grounded in the Quran as the revelation from God, precedes understanding. Ibn al-`Arabi writes:
"Then God undertakes to teach us through self-disclosure. We witness that which rational faculties cannot perceive through their reflective powers, but concerning which transmited knowledge has come. Reason has declared it impossible, the reason of the man of faith has interpreted it, and the simple man of faith has simply assented to it.
To paraphrase, the Muslim who is not first a pious man or woman, who does not respect the established "tradition", regardless of recognized individual failings in that tradition, will not and can not understand the Quran as God intended it to be understood. The straight path cannot be found through any form of doubt.
There is really nothing new or uniquely "Islamic" in this teleology of faith: "first you believe and then you will be able to understand." I was taught this as a child attending a fundamentalist Baptist church in this country. I was told that we children of father Adam (whose sin we still must bear) do not on our own choose to find God or choose to believe what God is telling us in the Bible. It is God, the preacher said, who chooses us, elects us, saves us, when we didn't deserve it at all. We don't earn our way to a saving faith, we are saved by the grace of God and only then are we able to understand why this soul-saving is the end-all of all that is. All the time (of course) seemingly without damaging the rather ambiguous notion here of free will.
It is a wonderfully simple doctrine, easily and often abused, but not so easily dismissed. This religious "just do it and you will see" attitude is by no means an epistemological leaping-off point peculiar to religion, although we often cite it as a defining characteristic when we attack religion. For Ibn al-`Arabi there is no traumatic "leap of faith" here, no sense that one must embrace something absurd, illogical, irrational, antagonistic to seeming reality, in order to see through the absurd to another type of truth. This Muslim scholar would have given a very different diagnosis to Kierkegaard's sickness unto death. The spiritually transmitted disease of doubt that we today seem unable to escape (any more than we can the common cold) was not endemic in Ibn al-`Arabi's day. The question of "how can I believe and be rational" did not plague Ibn al-`Arabi's thoughts, nor drive him to emotional, soul-wrenching torment. I am not being facetious when I observe that Ibn al-`Arabi could not have written a 13th century version of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The Quran is not only a revelation from God, a message to be accepted (this is what believers do) or rejected (this is what infidels do). For Ibn al-`Arabi the Quran is the authentic, concrete, and linguistic embodiment of God Himself, of ultimate Being. Over the centuries ignorant Christians have falsely accused Muslims of worshipping Muhammad, as though a Muhammadan (the pre post-modern word used for a Moslem or Muslim) was parallel in some way to a Christian, worshipping a man (be he idol or be he the son of man). This homocentric critique of Islam misses the point of the religion completely.
Islam presents, no less than Judaism or Christianity, a fundamentally logocentric view of the reality of God. God exists because he speaks and thus defines himself in the process of revelation. The transcendant God of the Old Testament styled himself as "I am who I am," self-righteously asserting himself as a being that needed no other name to be known. In the Christian Gospel of John we read: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The Christian thus personifies God as word or knowledge in the metaphorical image of God becoming mortal man. Yet, this unique mortal dimension of God (Christ) is seen as more than a mere mortal.
Muslims, however, do not personify God's revelation in the form of his human prophet, who is not thus denigrated for not being a demigod. Rather, the Muslim immortalizes the "word" in a real language -- Arabic -- as God's eloquent and chosen way of encountering humanity. God -- Allah in Arabic -- chose to reveal himself in Arabic. Muslims do not believe this choice was arbitrary, not the result of some cosmic lottery to sort through the Babel of tongues for the one "the" revelation should best be put in. Moreover, since God's message is revealed through the Arabic Quran, the message itself cannot be translated or properly communicated through another language. No Muslim can perform the necessary Arabized ritual of his faith in a language other than Arabic; the fatiha only opens the believer's heart -- in Arabic. One may understand what the Arabic words mean -- as mere language -- in English or whatever language, but only in Arabic is there the force of revelation. In fact, as Ibn al-`Arabi mentioned, Muslims were not even to take a written Quran into enemy (non-believer) territory. Great book though it was, it was clearly seen as more than paper, pen, and ink. This is a useful point to keep in mind and I will return to it soon.
The Struggling Believer's Novel and the Text

I could easily continue this discussion of the views of Ibn al-`Arabi for hours, days, or weeks (how long would it take to simply read 17,000 pages in his major work?) It is valuable to probe with a believer like this great scholar into the depths of his own meaning-rich search through the language of the Quran. But much has happened in the past 750 odd years in the Islamic World. Muslims, through no fault of their own, have been caught up in a broadening discourse defined in large part by the Judaeo-Christian West, even though any distinctive Judaeo-Christianness may have largely eroded. In contrast, Ibn al-`Arabi lived in a world in which the Quran's detractors -- those who did not grapple with this Arabic text as a revelation -- were few and far away. To be sure there were debates over the form of the revelation, although these were tilted to orthodoxy rather early on. But in his day there was no viable reason in the Muslim context not to accept the Quran as revelation.

Muslims over the past couple of centuries have been compelled to defend the Quran against what they believe is a secular war aimed against the integrity of their religion. The heartland of Islam since the 16th century has been dominated by Ottoman Turks (Muslim converts, it must be remembered) up until this century, with European colonial powers nibbling away at the often frayed edges of the Sublime Porte. The more recent raw power politics of this century, be this the regimen of Western-trained military elite takeovers, the imposition of secular Israel in a predominantly Islamic Middle East, the cleric-driven drive for a militant, rejectionist radicalism in Iran and Afghanistan, the dirt-poor rage of simple Egyptian fundamentalists, the cold war Sadaamizing of Kuwait, the collective blinking as Bosnia bleeds non-Christian blood -- these events have sharpened the frustration and anger of Muslims wherever they are. And at least three out of four Muslims are not in the Middle East. While we only rarely see these events on our evening news, for Muslims they are far more than ubiquitous sound bites; they are rather like pages torn without mercy, without compassion from their great book
Ironically, the Islam that we mistakingly think spread out of an uncouth tribal Arabian wasteland by the sword, has been most wounded not by earlier crusader zeal, nor by recent batteries of patriot missiles, but by the pen of a struggling believer, a single man born Muslim in India but bred in the marginal literary circles of a country which once fancied it owned India. A wounding, I might add, that may with some justification be called "self-inflected." This one man, who now lives in hiding with a price placed on head, has been more villified by contemporary Muslims of many persuasions around the world than any other single individual I know of -- Muslim or non-Muslim. I speak of Salman Rushdie, author of the avowedly controversial novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. While Rushdie the author does not wear his Islamic identity on his sleeve, he is well aware in real life that his Islamic origin -- a significant part of the otherness that haunts his search for identity --defined him as an outsider in a culture he thought might let him embrace it as an equal.
The irony is unending. Although very few Muslims and only a few non-Muslims have actually read through Rushdie's novel -- a 550 some page stream of dialogue that bedazzles and befuddles through a sweeping fantasy -- we in the West are far more aware of the Islamic backlash against Rushdie and his verses than we are of the essential fatiha that opens the Quran or the theology of a scholar like Ibn al-`Arabi. For the past five years indignant intellectuals and defenders of human rights have come to Rushdie's rhetorical defense, all the while chiding Muslim intellectuals for not rushing to do the same.
The West sees the death warrant issued against Rushdie by Khomeini (who ironically has tasted death first) as clear evidence that Islam is repressive and reactionary, not fit to be ecumenical in a new secular world order. On the other hand, I fully realize that the mere mention of The Satanic Verses , not excluding my own remarks tonight, tends to send a message to Muslims that their religion is not taken seriously. I might point out, however, that a fellow anthropologist, Prof. Akbar Ahmad (who happens to be Muslim) of London University, has recently argued that "no contemporary discussion of Muslim scholarship can be complete without reference to the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses." (PostModernism and Islam, 1992, p. 169). I would only add that Western non-Muslims can not fully appreciate how Muslims see the greatness of the Arabic Quran without understanding why a rather odd English novel has provoked such rage in Islamic countries where English novels are seldom if ever read.
It is not my intent to defend or critique Rushdie's novel anymore than I would the Quran. The novel is -- for anyone who takes the time to read it -- as fantastic as our cinematic representations of the original Arabian Nights. It tells us no more about Islam than Disney's Aladdin informs us about the Baghdad caliphate. Indeed, those who skip through looking for the satanic parts will be disappointed to find that much of the dialogue is between displaced Indian movie stars who can afford to escape the thirdworldliness of India for their civilization's Mecca -- England.
At the start of the fantasy two Indians-who-would-be-English are in free fall after their airplane is blown apart in the air by a terrorist bomb. One of these is the star of Rushdie's semi-autobiographical fantasy, Gibreel Farishta. Yet more irony ... the novel begins with lines of a decidedly Christian rhetoric:"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" Absurdly, Gibreel and his companion survive the fall, an occasion, Rushdie writes, for a National Holiday in England. "But," (and this is the gist in the novel's own words) when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith."
Rushdie writes on, hilariously yet unendingly for all but the most stalwart of his supporters, in the same free-fall, a half-awake, half-asleep dreamtime in which the details he learned as an Indian Muslim about Muhammad and the Quran come in and out of focus as clearly planned distortions to anyone who knows the original. Gibreel is himself a phantasm of the angel Gabriel, whom Muslims revere as the agent who brought the revelation to Muhammad, also the angel who introduced this "seal of the prophets" to his fellow prophets -- Abraham, Moses, Jesus, etc. -- during his fabulous, pre-Dantean night journey through the layers of heaven.
Someone who is not a Muslim would not generally recognize the extent to which Rushdie plays with Quranic passages and the life of the prophet, who is fantasized here as the unscrupulous Mahound, a none-too-subtle Jim Baker or Jimmy Swaggert type, and a synonym in English nuance, as it happens, for Satan. For Muslims the title The Satanic Verses says it all. These Satanic verses are not the product of Rushdie's rather fertile imagination; they refer to an issue that Muslims see as out-and-out blasphemy -- that Muhammad at one point had been inspired by the Devil and not by God. Some have argued that Muhammad once uttered words that allowed praise for three of the goddesses of Mecca, obviously more than a minor inconsistency with this monotheistic revelation as it was canonized. These controversial verses, which Rushdie builds a substantial part of his novel around, were later said to be abrogated by Muhammad when he learned in a subsequent revelation that they had been inspired by the Devil (Satan) rather than God. Whether or not this actually happened from a Muslim perspective is besides the point. It happens to hit a very raw nerve for Muslims, since it is one of the most potent symbols of blasphemy in Islam; and Rushdie obviously knows that.
The origins of Islam are revisited in the novel in a mythical place called Jahilia. While this would be read as just another exotic name by most non-Muslims, it is instantly recognized in Arabic as a reference to the paganism of pre-Islamic Arabia. The days of Jahiliya, literally "days of ignorance" were precisely what Muhammad condemned and what Islam would supercede. Rushdie spares little in satirizing the sacred history of the prophet Muhammad. For example, at one point Gibreel complains at length that Mahound's "revelation of convenience" is too legalistic, even giving rules on which way to face after a man farts (p. 363). While a non-believer may simply not care about such literary games -- after all the Quran is not seen as a revelation in the first place -- or may at most cry "shame," most Muslims feel betrayed. It is betrayal because it comes from a believer, not from an outside enemy.
Imagine if your best friend wrote you a letter in which he or she fantasized about having kinky sex -- and more than kinky -- with your spouse. Let us assume the letter was about thirty pages long and was quite descriptive, including variations of taped conversations of your actual spousal love-making. And then he or she told you it was not meant as a joke, that there was a passion that could not be denied and this was simply a way of working it out although still remaining your best friend. If this simple mundane letter could anger you, how much more if it were the distortion of a sacred book that you think is the greatest book because it came directly from God?
Concluding Remarks

The most important part of any lecture, assuming one is not completely turned off in the first minute or two, is supposed to come after the words "in conclusion." In conclusion. This means there must be a need to conclude something. Regarding the Quran as a great book, there is little need to conclude anything. The mere fact that this talk was scheduled and that you came shows that a sacred scripture commanding the attention of so many people on earth warrants consideration. Regarding how Muslims view the greatness of their Great Book, there is too much to conclude, too great a gap in experience, too challenging a call for empathy. Rather than try to tell you what the Quran is in a nutshell, I would simply ask that sometime soon you try reading it or at least a selection of excerpts.

However, having raised the issue of The Satanic Verses in a lecture on the Quran, a final comment does need to be made. If I were to simply tell you that most Muslims approach their sacred book quite differently, as I see it, than others approach their scriptures, you would probably say "alright, so things are different, so they have a right and we have a right, so what?" Even if the statement of faith outlined in the fatiha or the line of reasoning articulated by a brilliant scholar like Ibn al-`Arabi is instructive, you would probably still walk away tonight basically unchallenged and unchanged.
But listen to the following from The Satanic Verses:: At one point Rushdie speaks through a shady character named "Baal" (a name not unfamiliar to Biblical enthusiasts), who proposed that the prostitutes in an underground "Jahilia" whorehouse pretend (for their customers) that they are the wives of the prophet; this at the time Mahound (the prophet) had returned in triumph to the holy city. Upon hearing this, one of the girls says in utter shock to Baal: "God. If they heard you say that they'd boil your balls in butter." When Baal proceeded to lay out the plan for the madam, she responded: "It is very dangerous, but it could be damn good for business." While I do not wholly subscribe to the theory that authors tend to write self-fulfilling novels, it seems quite clear to me that "they" did hear and that they are indeed mad enough to "boil his balls in butter." The Ayyatollah Khomeni, who issued the fatwa for Rushdie's death, in fact stated that what Rushdie wrote about the Prophet literally made his blood boil (quoted in Appignanesi and Maitland 1990:73). The whole thing has been very dangerous, and there is little doubt but that the controversy has been "damn good for business."
The question that remains for me is why Rushdie -- being brought up as a Muslim, even a backsliding one -- did not realize what the reaction of his fellow Muslims would be (Baal was certainly not naive about how Mahound would respond to knowing whores were pretending to be his wives), or why Rushdie realized it but went ahead and did it anyway. To a certain extent Rushdie's public presentation of his private doubt came at the wrong time -- it was a convenient lightning rod at a time when anger against the West -- understandable anger at that -- needed to go somewhere.
But the key I think is found in the same passage (p. 380), where Rushdie comments: "Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy." In an interview ironically broadcast the same day in 1989 as Khomeini's death warrant, Rushdie added: "Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the 20th century" (quoted in Appignanesi and Maitland 1990:24). Here I think is the crux of the problem. We can readily identify with Rushdie on doubt as the norm in the secular as well as much of the sacred thinking of our West. We can read The Satanic Verses as an exercise in dealing with that doubt, one that Rushdie as an immigrant author in our backyard vigorously defends as viable even though it may be seen as blatant unbelief by his critics. But the problem is that Rushdie, at least up until a recent interview with
David Frost, has never claimed not to have belief. He has simply admitted to doubt.
We must not confuse Rushdie's doubt as a statement of unbelief simply because the characters in his novel do lose their faith. Were he not Muslim, were he someone who openly despised everything Islam stood for, it might be true that there was no blasphemy. Worse things have been said about Islam by infidels. It is precisely because he was born a Muslim, has never formally renounced his right to define Islam his own way, and steadfastly says to all who will listen "I believe" that many Muslims see Rushdie's doubt as blasphemy and feel betrayed.
The issue is not what men seek to do to blasphemers in God's name. No matter what the religion, they usually seek to do the wrong thing. And, I would argue, the issue is not really one of freedom of speech or literary license. Most Muslims do not feel that their own faith is threatened by the publication of The Satanic Verses, nor that non-believers will pick up this novel to learn about Islam. And make no doubt doubt it, many are angry because their clerics have told them to be so. If an assassin does one day end Rushdie's life, it will not be anyone who has read the disputed book. To me all of this says very little about Islam, because it is a political and social issue not a distinctively religious one.
Earlier I pointed out that a Muslim was not supposed to take a physical copy of the Quran into enemy territory. This was not out of fear that the infidels would not believe, or even that they would doubt. It was simply a logical extension of a view about revelation that differs substantially from Judaism and Christianity as these are defined in the mainstream today. While once upon a time playing with the scriptural revelations of the Torah or Bible would have elicited the same anger, sense of betrayal and even invitation for torture or death, we have come to terms with the need and even the value of doubt in our secular world. Not being a fervent "believer" myself, I would hardly choose otherwise. But I sense that we are also intolerant when it comes to religions which have not been replaced by secularized doubt. We in effect worship doubt as only natural and perhaps even a way to test and refine religious faith.
Let me put it bluntly, what offends the West about Islam is that Muslims don't seem to believe in doubt, or perhaps more accurately in making a public display of it. There is no literary criticism of the Quran from within the Islamic context, no radical theology which concludes God must be dead, no worrisome fretting that one cannot believe in revelation and also be rational. In a way what is offensive about Islam is that Muslims by and large seem rather comfortable with their religion, are able to adapt it to a wide variety of cultural contexts, and have never given up the belief -- despite colonial domination of many Muslims countries by the secular West -- that their revelation is in fact "better" than the ones we have long since relegated to the history of ideas.
As Muslims look at their great book, there is room to believe, there is room to not believe, but there is little room or need for doubt in approaching the Quran. Where there is doubt, as Rushdie certainly has discovered by now, there is blasphemy.