The Qur'an and I. The Qur'an and Now.

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.