Pakistan Today
Friday, January 23, 2004
Study
The Koran?
By: Daniel Pipes
"Anyone concerned with
what's happening in our world ought to spend some time reading the
Koran." Andy Rooney, the famed CBS commentator, gave this advice
shortly after 9/11, as did plenty of others. His suggestion makes
intuitive sense, given that the terrorists themselves say they are
acting on the basis of the holy scripture of Islam. Accused 9/11
ringleader Mohamed Atta had a Koran (sometimes spelled Qur'an) in
the suitcase he had checked for his flight. His five-page document
of advice for fellow hijackers instructed them to pray, ask God
for guidance, and "continue to recite the Koran." Osama bin Laden
often quotes the Koran to motivate and convince followers.
Witnesses
report that at least one of the suicide bombers who tried to
assassinate Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf last month was
reading the Koran before blowing himself up. Hamas suicide
videotapes routinely feature the Koran.
And lots of
non-Muslims in fact have been reading the Koran. In the weeks
after Sept. 11, the book's largest publisher in the United States
reported that sales had quintupled; it had to airlift copies from
Great Britain to meet the demand. American bookstores reported
selling more Korans than Bibles.
All this,
incidentally, was music to Islamist ears. Hossam Gabri of the
Islamic Society of Boston, a group tied to a terrorism funder,
considers non-Muslims trying to understand the Koran "a very good
development."
But reading
the Koran is precisely the wrong way to go about understanding
"what's happening in our world." That's because the Koran is:
Profound. One
cannot pick it up and understand its meaning when nearly every
sentence is the subject of annotations, commentaries, glosses, and
superglosses. Such a document requires intensive study of its
context, development, and rival interpretations. The U.S.
Constitution offers a good analogy; its 2nd Amendment consists of
a just twenty-seven words ("A well regulated militia, being
necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people
to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed") but it is the
subject of numerous book-length studies. No one coming fresh to
this sentence has any idea of its implications.
Complex and
contradictory. Contradictions in the text have been studied and
reconciled over the centuries through extensive scholarly study.
Some verses have been abrogated and replaced by others with
contrary meanings. For example, verse 9:5 commands Muslims not to
slay pagans until the sacred months have passed and verse 9:36
tells Muslims to fight pagans during those same months. The casual
reader has no idea which of these is operational. (In fact, the
latter is.)
Static: An
unchanging holy scripture cannot account for change over time. If
the Koran causes terrorism, then how does one explain the 1960s,
when militant Islamic violence barely existed? The Koran was the
same text then as now. More broadly, over a period of fourteen
centuries, Muslims have been inspired by the Koran to act in ways
aggressive and passive, pious and not, tolerant and not. Logic
demands that one look elsewhere than an immutable text to account
for such shifts.
Partial: Holy
books have vast importance but do not create the immediate context
of action. Reading the Bible in isolation gives limited insight
into the range of Jewish and Christian experiences over the
millennia; likewise, Muslims have read the Koran differently over
time. The admonishment for female modesty meant one thing to
Egyptian feminists in the 1920s and another to their descendants
today. Then, head coverings represented oppression and exclusion
from public life.
Today, in the
words of a British newspaper headline, "Veiled is beautiful."
Then, the head-covering signaled a woman not being a full human
being; now, in the words of an editor at a fashion magazine,
head-covering "tells you, you're a woman. … You have to be treated
as an independent mind." Reading the Koran in isolation misses
this unpredictable evolution.
In brief, the
Koran is not a history book.
A history book, however, is a history book. Instead of the Koran,
I urge anyone wanting to study militant Islam and the violence it
inspires to understand such phenomena as the Wahhabi movement, the
Khomeini revolution, and Al-Qaeda.
Muslim
history, not Islamic theology, explains how we got here and hints
at what might come next.
(Daniel
Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is a historian, director of the Middle
East Forum, and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).)
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