Recently some friends
and I started up another Qur’an study circle for women in South Africa. Some
thoughts arising…
The Qur’an and I. We go way back. But not to childhood.
Growing up all I knew of the Qur’an was that I had a
precious page of it folded up in a Persian enameled book-shaped locket, and
that my grandmother used to sit aside quietly and read it a lot. It was only in
my late teens when my father suddenly (or so it seemed to me) started to engage
with it that I really became aware of it. With the family then transplanted from
Knightsbridge to Texas, he was spending hours reading it, researching it and
sharing his discoveries with a reverential audience of American and British
converts to Islam. I did not know it then but this period of his activity as a
teacher was to form the core foundation of his life’s work, and imbued in me a
sense of the living Qur’an.
This living Qur’an was – is
– so much more than a mere book. For me
it has taken on the role of a powerful link, a reference point to wholesome
guidance, spiritual insight, requiting moments of anguish and despair, and also
on occasion functioning as an oracle. Through it one hears the voice of
Allah, mediated through time and history and the Prophet’s presence (S), but
the voice of divinity nonetheless. And it pleases my musical soul to hear in its
cadences and rhythms that follow their own internal coherence, at times formal,
at other times abstract, the voice of truths beyond time, yet fully within the alif, ba’, ta’ (abc) of temporal
language.
It was those handful of years when my father gave a
profusion of talks on selected Suras of the Qur’an which drilled into me
certain verses til they became the tent pegs of my little tent in the desert of
my wanderings.
Hearing specific verses come up repeatedly, as my father
explained the Qur’an by referring to other parts of the Qur’an, fused them into
my neural pathways. These were the truth posts my pinball self pinged against in the
gameplay of life. And when challenges presented themselves – as they still do –
some verses just materialize to dissipate looming despair, encourage me,
reassure me, or hold up a mirror of reckoning. If my feelings ever shroud those
reverberations in my soul, grabbing the Qur’an and opening it at any random
point sucks me into that knowingness again. That knowingness is the certainty that Allah is
above all in charge of everything, that everything seen and unseen remain in perfect balance, that His mercy
overcomes all things, that there is a reason for everything, that the point of
it all is not meaningless suffering but a movement towards light from darkness.
I never went to Islamic Sunday school. I never attended madrasa. I was never schooled in Islamic
catechism in any other way other than through the living example of my father
and family and the surrounding community of sincere western Muslims. These living books were naturally supplemented
by printed versions. As I learnt my Deen
from my late teens through to my early twenties, I found I had to avoid looking
towards the contemporary Middle East for models and paradigms of ideal Muslim
living, for whatever I saw there confused me and left me perplexed and angry.
What my limited vision and insight saw was so inconsonant with what I knew to
be our beautiful Deen. And so I clung
to the horizons right before me.
Thus my approach to the Qur’an was shaped by the principle
that the Qur’an must speak to me in the here and now. In whatever circumstance
I may find myself the Qur’an must be relevant.
Perhaps the most visceral experience of the presence of the
Qur’an in my life was when as a young woman I found out I had breast cancer.
During that trial it felt like huge enormous parts of me – of who I thought I
was – were falling away, crumbling like an ancient temple in the face of a
pounding flood. Once the water had swept past, all that remained were pillars
pointing high up into the sky. And each of these pillars was made of a verse,
the ones etched most deeply into my conscious awareness. These ayat pulsated with life and light and
remained the beacons that enabled me, whatever was left of me, to weather the
chemical storm and rearrangement of self-perception.
The Qur’an and Now
Over the years I have spent many hours in the company of
Muslim women hungry for more knowledge of the Qur’an, studying and discussing
its verses and themes. As the pendulum of history has slowly started to swing
in the direction of enfranchising women,
women have started to engage with the Qur’an on our own terms. We have been striving to develop a
relationship with the Qur’an that goes far beyond patriarchal claims to
knowledge or superiority and to the business of beingness. The mystery of what
it means to be human, to be a servant of God – that is what engages us. I have
gained so much delight from sharing the approach I have learnt with others:
each session has felt like getting into a spaceship and shooting for the stars.
The understandable awe and reverence felt for the Qur’an
among Muslims as the Book of God has often acted as a barrier to engaging with
it and gaining meaning from it. Among non-Arab speakers, access to Qur’an can
seem impenetrable, for Arabic is a complex language. For native Arabic speakers,
it should not be assumed that Qur’anic Arabic is automatically intelligible, for
modern parlance has dragged certain words away from their original contexts and
lent them different shades of meaning. So for them the challenge is not to read
with blind assumptions. It has become clear to me that Arabic had been invented
for the Qur’an – the Qur’an itself
intimates as much. The intricate root and branch system of Arabic reveals
forests of meaning that bring colour and light and bedazzlement to the body of
this revelation. These forests confound linear
literary models, plunging us into a wonder-world of inter-connectedness, allowing us to taste Tawhid, the underlying unity behind
variegated life experience.
Never has the Qur’an been more accessible, and never has
mankind been in more dire need of it. Yet at the same time an opposite truth
also presents: greater accessibility means more opportunities for
misinterpretation. The challenge in how to negotiate the relationship between
reason and revelation has never been as tough as it is for Muslims today. For this task we need women’s voices to
integrate with men’s, and discourses that take us out of halls of self-righteous
judgment into fields of ethics and morals,
out of polarizing ‘Othering’ and into oneness, away from shadowplay into
the zenith sunlight of the love of God.
