There was a 20th-century Egyptian scholar named ‘A’ishah ‘Abd al-Rahman, who published under the pen name Bint al-Shati’ (daughter of the seashore)-- she wrote volume after volume about the Qur’an, but instead of religious exegesis, she studied it as a work of literature using linguistic analysis. Sort of what you had in mind.
Just posting this to show that your idea for the thread is a sound one, would that it might succeed. It’s sad that no one can say the word “Islam” any longer without being immediately drowned out by a loud chorus of noise.
Fatwa’s are religious judgements based on the Koran. They make the news when the judgment issued is a death warrant. The judgement is considered above all other laws and is meant to be carried out regardless of national sovereignty. That is the context the world knows it by and how it is understood.
It’s not the Koran that needs to be studied and discussed as much as the practice of it’s followers. To understand the religion of peace you need to study a newspaper. That is where the reality of action meets the concept of doctrine. In an age where nuclear technology is easier to acquire there is statistical certainty of conflict when action follows doctrine.
Monty- I would like to be considered in favor of the OP. I am ready to escape this sidetrack debate and try reading the text in the version selected. As stated above, can anyone direct me to a link to this version?
I’m not sure how soon Monty would want to start, but I found mine on eBay (buy it now) for a quarter and even with the slowest shipping, that means delivery should be within about two weeks and immediate for PayPal.
Uh, meant by WHO? I suppose you can invent your own magical sense of what you are supposed to read something as, but in general, the authors that wrote the texts probably had a specific meaning when they wrote it, and trying to wash that away or claim that there was some mysterious power working on them by which some other message was hidden behind their intended meaning is a pretty long stretch.
In the last thread we discussed this in, you claimed that the Old Testament does not call for death on idolaters, or people that break the sabbath, and so on, despite chapter and verse not only saying exactly that, but then people actually carrying it out under God’s authority.
The fact is, you can read these text in a non-literal sense, but only by taking what they say less seriously, and taking your own judgment more seriously. At that point, you have to ask what the point of the exercise is in the first place, since you already know better than the text in order to get there.
Have you read Sam Harris? What you are calling ludicrous is exactly his premise. I find his argument compelling, reasonable and well-documented. It’s not bigotted just because you disagree with it. Read it and see what you think. Before you do that, we are not on the same philosophical page.
I would like to make a humble suggestion. I’m willing to read it, but perhaps a thread for each book might make for a little more organized discussion.
I’d be in. I think I’ll buy a paper copy; I hate reading large chunks of text on screen. I think weekly assignments of a manageable chunk of the book would be a useful approach, and that it’ll probably take some real time to finish it.
I’ve been meaning to read the Qur’an for a long time, and a SDMB reading group might be just the thing for me…
To the people who have responded to my earlier posts - I am not ignoring you, but I am also not going to hijack this thread anymore. If you would like to continue discussing the validity of judging one billion highly diverse people by the literal words of a religious text that they may or may not follow to varying degrees, then please start another thread.
This post is not intended as a hijack, just an F.Y.I. footnote. About various English translations.
My first place choice would be the translation by a pair of Indian Muslim women: Shehnaz Shaikh and Kausar Khatri.* (Another woman translator is Zaheen Fatima Baig. All three women take you through the Arabic text one word at a time, and then assemble the sentence into English. Unfortunately Ms. Baig’s English is not so good.)
Next, I would recommend Ahmed Ali, because he takes verse 4:34 to mean “do not beat women” and this is very, very important. I want a copy of this translation in every Muslim home and mosque in the English-speaking world.
For quoting from Qur’an texts as literature, I prefer the translation of A.J. Arberry, which was designed to sound nice when read aloud as English literature.
A. Yusuf Ali’s translation has been for many years the most popular one all through the Muslim English-speaking world.
The one by Marmaduke Pickthall is the text I was assigned as a college undergraduate, but it’s real heavy on the King James style and I never cared for it much. Also he uses the alternate numbering of verses in surahs 2 and 5, which is confusing to students.
I’m saddened that the “First American Version” by the Canadian-born Muslim scholar T.B. Irving has already been forgotten. He intended it to be the first accessible text for American youth, written in regular modern American English. He got no support at all from the American Islamic institutions, it’s a shame, he was such a nice grandfatherly old coot.
Avoid the official Saudi Wahhabi translation by Khan and Hilali at all costs! It totally stinks!
As for the Shakir translation, I don’t know what others see in it, I never got much of an impression from it one way or the other; I don’t know anything wrong with it either. If everyone wants to use that, I’ll go along.
*Footnote to a footnote: The surname Shaikh indicates a high-caste Indian Muslim, to the extent that Indian Muslims have developed their own caste system as a bleed-over from their Hindu background. Speaking of which, the surname Khatri refers to a Hindu high caste, the Kshatriya, which became Khatri in Hindi.
When I read the Qur’an, I follow an approach that Asma Barlas calls Reading Liberation from the Quran (.pdf). Dr. Barlas is the author of “Believing Women” in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (U. of Texas Press, 1992), which I recommend very highly.
Likewise, I recommend Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective by Amina Wadud (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1999). As an outspoken leader of the radical woman-imam movement, Dr. Wadud has been collecting her own set of death theats, and she is my hero.
Given that this thread has already suffered numerous misunderstandings (with a handful of attmepted political hijackings), i would suggest that Monty open a fresh thread in CS with a title along the lines of “An examination of the Qur’an as literature.”
I suggest that other posters wait for Monty to kick it off so that everyone interested knows that it was the thread initially suggested, here (and so that Monty can frame the discussion as he would like to see it, rather than spending the first 38 posts with other posters arguing whether it is going in the “right” direction).