Reading the Qur'an in 2016

Photo by Ox FF

This year, America will mark the 15th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. After the attacks,  wave of intense fear and hatred of Muslims, as well as many acts of anti-Muslim violence, coursed through the nation. Later,  attacks were the cause for war in Afghanistan and, arguably, Iraq.

15 years hence, one might have expected these effects to have dwindled. But the war in Afghanistan is still happening. The destabilization of Iraq caused has given rise to the Islamic State and its orgiastic acts of violence, domestic and international. At the end of last year, threats and violence toward Muslims reached their highest levels since 2001. Politicians across the country have moved to prevent Muslim war refugees from sheltering here. On the crest of this wave of fear, a presidential candidate is gaining popularity amid promises to register American Muslims en masse and to deny entry to all foreign ones; he is threatening to capture the Republican nomination. Recently, he criticized the Pope himself for his supposedly soft stance on ISIS.

Fear of Islam is an understandable reaction to current events. Acts of terror and violence are frightening, as are people, cultures, and traditions about which we know little, or nothing. Nevertheless, if Americans are to be proponents of religious liberty, beacons of enlightened tolerance, or in any way heirs to the good in the American tradition, we must defend Islam and its adherents from those who would murder or expel them. But if we are to defend Muslims, we must know what they believe and practice—we must examine their traditions, engage their ideas, and above all, we must study their scripture.

Now is the time for Americans to read the Qur'an.

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If Americans ought now to read the Qur'an, Christians are doubly obliged. Fear of Islam is significantly concentrated among American Christians, after all. Perhaps we suffer from fear of Islamic supercessionism; maybe we are worried about being outnumbered by Muslims in the future; it could simply be that there is a long tradition of enmity between Christians and Muslims, stretching back to at least the Crusades.

Over the course of the coming year, I will read the Qur'an, and I will comment on it here from time to time. This will be an unapologetically Christian reading of the Qur'an; I will ask questions of it and seek answers to them as a Christian. I will not pretend that I believe that the Qur'an is divinely revealed or the direct speech of God, though I will treat it with the respect due to a text held sacred by a billion people, and to my cousin religion's sacred scripture. When it is reasonable, I will draw comparisons with the Bible.

As a Christian, I am fully aware that a religion and its scripture are not at all the same thing. Reading a scripture as if it is the religion, ignoring the history of interpreting that scripture and of practices and beliefs outside that scripture, is foolishness. Certainly my reading of the Bible bore this out—I enjoyed exploring a complex and beautiful set of texts, but could not have derived from them the Christian faith and its practices for all the gold leaf in Rome.

So this reading of the Qur'an will be supplemented by other texts about the Qur'an and Islam. The main goal of reading these other books will be to inform my understanding of the Qur'an itself; the secondary goal, though, is to help create themes for my different posts.

Unlike the Bible, which is clearly broken into sections by both chronology and genre, and therefore lends itself easily to discrete posts about, say, the early history of Israel, or Biblical poetry, the Qur'an is divided into chapters or surahs that are ordered primarily by length, from longest to shortest. This makes it hard to read the Qur'an in chunks and write meaningful, thematically unified essays about what has been read so far.

So each post will be partly about whichever surahs I have read since the last post, but also about a topic that appears within those surahs, as discussed in whichever supplementary book or books I have chosen on said topic. Topics I aim to discuss include: Jesus in the Qur'an, women in the Qur'an, and the Qur'an and Islam in Western literature.

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The Qu'ran I plan to use for this reading is The Study Quran, released late last year by HarperCollins. It is a new translation with verse-by-verse commentary (i.e., ayah-by-ayah commentary), in the manner of a study Bible. There does not seem to be much of a tradition of publishing the Qur'an this way, at least not in English, so I feel very fortunate that The Study Quran was released when it was. Reading with explanatory commentary very close at hand is my preferred method of reading any unfamiliar scripture (including my own).

My first post in the series, in which I will give a general introduction to the Qur'an and discuss the surahs I have read so far, should be out in a few weeks. If you want to follow along, you can start at surah 67 and work your way toward the end; I will be starting with these, the shortest surahs, before taking up the much longer ones at the start of the book.