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The Bible, the Qur‘an, and Jesus: How to reach the heart of the Muslim creed: An interview with Michel Cuypers (Chiesa, 6/04/07)

Q: Brother Michel Cuypers, talk to us about your research and your new book, “Le Festin: Une lecture de la sourate al-Maida [The Banquet: An Interpretation of the al-Ma’ida Sura].”

A: For a dozen years I have been carrying out a study on the composition of the Qur’an, using a method called “rhetorical analysis,” already used in biblical studies. This research takes advantage of two and a half centuries of studies on the Bible, and twenty years ago it was systematized in an excellent way by Roland Meynet, a Jesuit professor of biblical theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

What this means is a rediscovery of the techniques of writing and composition that the scribes of the ancient Semitic world used to create their texts. The word “rhetorical” must therefore be taken in this case in the precise sense of “the art of composition of the text” (which corresponds only in part to what Aristotle meant by the word “dispositio,” or rhetoric).

Biblical – and, more broadly, Semitic – rhetoric differs completely from that of the Greeks, which has marked all of our Western culture, and also Arab culture, after this opened itself to the Greek cultural heritage. [...]

Q: Do you consider it important that, at this time, the Qur’an is being approached with scholarly methodologies such as hermeneutics and biblical exegesis?

A: In effect, I consider this of fundamental importance. Traditional Islamic exegesis, after accomplishing all that it could, exhausted its resources long ago: for many decades, it has done nothing but repeat the comments of the first three or four centuries of the Hijra. The great classical commentaries are still texts of reference, and they must be consulted, especially for questions of grammar or philology, but they cannot in any way give a reply to the problems of modern man, who lives in a completely different world.

It is precisely for this reason that important ideological commentaries appeared in the twentieth centuries, the best-known of which include those of the Indian-Pakistani Mawdûdî and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, an ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood: these are interpretations of the Qur’an prompted by modern social and political realities. Contemporary Islamic currents make direct reference to these; their slogan is that of returning to the Qur’an, beyond all of the deviations and decadence of the Muslim community‘s history. But the question is this: how does one “return to the Qur’an”?

The quickest and easiest way is that of projecting upon it one’s own personal aspirations, manipulating the text however one pleases. A growing number of Muslim intellectuals are forcefully denouncing this way of proceeding, and are calling for a scholarly study of the text, as Christians have done with the Bible. The road is clearly a long and arduous one, and the results are unforeseeable: this is perhaps the reason for the fear it arouses. On the part of the Muslims, the research in this direction is in its earliest stage, apart from a few exceptions, while the Western Orientalists have for a century and a half provided an enormous amount of data (which can be found especialy in the “Encyclopedia of Islam" and in the very recent "Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ân"). The great centers of Muslim theology, like Al-Azhar University in Cairo, are still very distrustful of these modern methodologies.

Q: How can one arrive at the heart of the Qur’an, without getting caught up in the various interpretive traditions that can cause deviations?

A: The “method,” if it can be called this, is no different from the one required by any other sort of scholarly research, and it is the critical capacity. This requires spiritual asceticism: the ability to distance oneself from the object of study, to be ready to question received ideas and make unexpected discoveries (it is not true that one finds only what one is seeking!), not to affirm anything without having demonstrated it, to submit, in studying the text, to the discipline of the modern human sciences (above all linguistics, history, literary criticism).

Muhammad Arkoun, a French thinker of Algerian origin, has asserted with reason and with a bit of humor that the most effective way of fighting against the violence and terrorism of the Islamic extremists would be to make the “Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ân,” the result of this kind of scholarly and critical approach to the Book, required reading for young students. The great difficulty is that in the Middle East, education is essentially founded upon tradition and memorization, and not upon reflection and the critical spirit. This is a cultural phenomenon that poses problems for scholarly progress in general, and for the evolution of exegesis in particular.

Q: In your view, could this approach to the text of the Qur’an give an impression of attacking Islam, or, on the contrary, of attaining the purity of the Qur’anic faith?

A: Islam was not established on the basis of the Qur’an alone. The hadîth, which are attributed to the prophet and form the Sunna (or the traditions that can be traced back to the imams for the Shiites), and later the elaboration of Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh) and law (shari’a) have played a role just as important, if not more so. Commentary (tafsîr) on the Qur’an is part of the Islamic tradition. In order to explain the text, the classical commentaries primarily make reference to the “circumstances of revelation,” of which I have spoken above, and thus to a principle outside of the text.

Rhetorical analysis, instead, takes under examination only the text as it is, in its canonical version. It methodically abstracts from tradition (at least at first) and, because it approaches the text in a completely new way, it often arrives at interpretations that do not agree with it. Nonetheless, it absolutely does not attack the heart of the Muslim faith; on the contrary, it brings this to light even more, liberating it from the additions that have weighed it down through history.

The example that I gave above is proof of this: the chronological end of the Mohammedan revelation (the end of Sura 5) and the conclusion of the Book (Sura 112) have exactly the same content, emphasizing the fact that Islamic monotheism rigorously rejects the idea of the divine filiation of Jesus: this is at the heart of the Muslim creed. One could make another example of the evocation of the supper in verses 112-115: the traditional commentaries are extremely misleading, because they treat the text as a marvelous account that describes with great gusto the sumptuous foods of the meal that God sends down from heaven.

But an attentive reading instead discovers here many echoes of the discourse on the bread of life, in chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, which immediately brings an entirely different dimension to the text, that of the allusion to the new covenant brought by Jesus and to the decision that the apostles (and the Christians after them) must face: to enter into this covenant, or to pass beyond it, embracing the one brought by Mohammed. A contextual and intertextual interpretation permits one to leave behind an anecdotal reading and to arrive at theological dimensions that were ignored by the ancient commentaries, and yet are absolutely in keeping with the Islamic faith.

Q: Will Muslim theologians understand that rhetorical analysis of the text makes possible an interpretation of it that should permit a renewal of Qur’anic exegesis as it has done for biblical exegesis?

A: These things require time. Let’s remember the difficulties at the beginning of modern exegesis in the Catholic Church. There also exist various schools of thought: rhetorical biblical analysis had to assert itself not against, but side by side with the historical-critical approach to the Bible, which was the only school recognized for a long time.

Given the enormous weight of tradition within Islam, one can foresee that things will advance more slowly (“in geological time,” as a great expert on Islam has joked). It will be without a doubt the burdensome and difficult task of the Muslim intellectuals – who will have perfectly assimilated the modern scholarly spirit – to weave the bond between the traditional theologies and the new approaches to the Qur’anic text. These intellectuals are perfectly aware of what is at stake, and this is why I did not hesitate to ask an eminent Muslim researcher, professor Mohamed-Ali Amir-Moezzi, to write the preface for my book.

Islam's pope may well prove to be The Pope.

MORE:
Blair launches fund to improve teaching of Islam (Matthew Tempest, June 4, 2007, Guardian Unlimited)

Tony Blair today launched a passionate defence of Islam as a religion of "moderation and modernity", as he announced a £1m government fund to aid teaching of the religion and train UK imams. [...]

Mr Blair was opening a two-day conference on Islam hosted by Cambridge University, which also marked the publication of a government-commissioned report into the teaching of Islam in the UK.

Written by leading scholar Dr Ataullah Siddiqui for the Department of Education, it says that teaching of Islam fails to reflect the "realities" of the faith in modern day multicultural Britain, instead focusing too narrowly on the Middle East.

The PM pledged a fund to implement the report's findings, such as helping train Muslim imams in UK universities to reduce mosques' reliance on overseas ministers who may not understand British society or speak good English.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 4, 2007 7:01 AM