The Qur'an and Violence

I had planned for this month's post to be on the Qur'an and Jesus, since he shows up repeatedly throughout the early parts that I am reading. And I may still get around to that before July, but since many people are arguing about it right now, it seems like an important moment to talk about the complex relationship between the Qur'an, Islam, and violence. As someone who is currently reading the Qur'an, and about the Qur'an from experts in its history and interpretation, I feel slightly more qualified than the average American to speak on this subject. This does not, by any means, make me an expert.

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The Qur'an is often held up as a book that advocates violence. Certainly, the Qur'an has a distinct relationship with violence from that of, say, the New Testament, since it does explicitly advocate violent action, which by and large the New Testament does not. 

Many in the West have seized upon this fact and declared Islam a violent religion. They deliberately conflate the religion of a billion and a half souls with the violence committed by a few. "Muslims are committing violence, the Qur'an advocates violence, therefore Islam is inherently violent." Arguments like this, and they are everywhere today, are simplistic, as well as both logically and morally wrong. 

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If Islam is a religion of violence, in which one is commanded to commit violence in order to forcibly convert others or punish them for their unbelief, then it seems to me that about 1.6 billion people are doing it wrong, while only a few thousand people are doing it right. Arguing that this small minority of extremist groups are the true face of Islam, rather than an aberration with its roots outside the religion, is akin to claiming that the KKK is the true face of Christianity. This is a simple point that I have never seen adequately addressed by Islam's skeptics and haters. 

"But," you may ask, "what about all those violent verses in the Qur'an? Aren't ISIS or Al-Qaeda Al-Shabaab or Boko Haram just taking them literally? Doesn't that make them the most serious, hardcore, real Muslims, and the rest of the Islamic world just fakers?" 

It does not. It makes them cherry pickers! These groups desire strongly to commit violence. For a variety of reasons--political, economic, social--they have come to see acts of violence as the best way to ensure a good life and a better world for themselves and, perhaps, for others. They cloak these motives in religious rhetoric and the most violent pieces of their religious tradition--they may even believe that Islam requires them to do what they do--but this requires vast and willful ignorance of the rest of their religion. 

The Qur'an itself, the many traditions about the Prophet, and the huge breadth and depth of Islamic interpretation and law surrounding both of these, all place limits on the use of violence, limits which terrorists and other extremist groups must willfully ignore in order to justify their actions. Here are some limits to violence just within the Qur'an:

• It is unlawful to kill except for murder or "working corruption on the earth" (5:32). 
• Waging aggressive warfare is not allowed--if your enemy wishes for peace, you must agree. (2:190, 4:90, 8:61).
• Compelling people to convert to Islam, by violence or any other means, is forbidden (2:256, 10:99-100).

It is, of course, possible to argue that these verses are abrogated by others that urge Muslims to commit violence, and no doubt some have done so. It remains telling that the vast majority of Muslims both now and in the past have not committed acts of terror and violence in the name of their religion. 

Again: If Islam is a religion of violence, why are 1.6 billion Muslims so terrible at it? I say: Islam is a religion in which violence is permitted but held in check, and Muslims on the whole are actually pretty good at that. 

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"Why are the verses there in the first place?" you may ask. It's a fair question. This is where it helps to know a little history. 

The Muslim community was, from the first, threatened by outside forces. Nearby people, especially practitioners of traditional Arab religions (which Muslims dismissed as idolatry) were unhappy about this new religion--they felt threatened by it, since it told them their traditions, which they relied upon for a sense of identity, safety, and community, were not just incorrect, but against the will of God. Unsurprisingly, the early Muslims were targets of harassment, persecution, and violence. The early Muslim community was forced to take a stance on whether it would use force to defend itself. And, to a limited but still substantial extent, it was decided that it would.*

Though as a Christian, I believe that killing, even in self-defense, is wrong and often counterproductive, I don't begrudge the early Muslim community for deciding to defend themselves rather than die. After all, if you believe that you're on earth to warn people to lead better lives and follow God's way, and that no one else is really going to be able to tell people to do that, I can see how self-defense might be a noble and just act. If you're all dead, who's going to tell people the news? In this context, one can see why it might be a righteous act to struggle against one's attackers. 

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I don't believe that Islam is inherently dangerous. As with any system of belief--religious, political, or otherwise--there are dangerous ideas within Islam. Unlike explicitly hateful or destructive systems of thought, however, the violent material in the Qur'an and elsewhere is typically balanced out by more positive and fruitful material about tolerance, compassion, and peace. The decision to follow the former and ignore the latter is a choice, and a bad one--not a necessary and natural result of accepting Islam. 

I encourage readers to push back against anyone who suggests otherwise, this week or in the future. Saying that Islam is inherently violent is not a neutral point of view. It is exactly this rhetoric that has been, is being, and will be used to justify targeted assassinations, violence against civilians, and entangling and futile foreign wars, not to mention denial of basic human decency and safety to people in our own country. The existence of Muslim extremist groups is primarily the result of tribalism, political instability, economic woes, and other extra-religious forces. To blame the actions of so few on the faith of many is to put the many in danger that they do not deserve. 

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*This is one point where I think a study in contrasts between Christianity and Islam is interesting--both faced violence and persecution in their very early histories, and had different responses to it. In contrast to Muhammed, Jesus explicitly forbade violence against oppressors and commanded his followers to love their enemies. But, just as the decision to use force was a survival tactic for early Muslims, this was a survival tactic for the early Christian community. Jesus had seen that violent uprisings against Rome only led to the death and scattering of Jewish people, and he was telling his followers not to participate in the next one. When a number of Jews rebelled in 70 AD, Christians did not join them, and were spared much of the brutality that followed, culminating in the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The historical difference is that the early Christians were, by and large, protected by a powerful state, even though it also harassed and occasionally persecuted them--all they had to do to survive as a group was not join in mass rebellions and draw negative attention to the community. The early Muslim community had no such protections--their surrounding societies and governments were much more fragmented and tribal, and it seems to me that self-defense or, perhaps, exile were the only real options for survival. Given that exile could just as easily mean starvation and death in a desert region, I can see why Muhammad and the early Muslims chose to fight it out.

Bibliography:

Cole, Juan. "Top Ten Ways Islamic Law Forbids Terrorism." Informed Comment. April 13, 2013. Accessed June 13, 2016. http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/ten-ways-islamic-forbids-terrorism.html. 

Dagli, Caner K. "Conquest and Conversion, War and Peace in the Quran." In The Study Quran, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al, 1805-1817. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

Dagli, Caner K. "The Phony Islam of ISIS." The Atlantic. February 27, 2015. Accessed June 13, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/what-muslims-really-want-isis-atlantic/386156/.

Jihad and the Islamic Law of War. Jordan: The Royal AAL Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 2009. 

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

Reading the Qur'an - The Qur'an and the Old Testament

Left: my Study Qur'an, a present from my wife. Right: my Hebrew Bible, a present from my past self.

I spent the last month reading the second surah of the Qur'an, Al-Baqarah, The Cow. It's named after a bit of dialog in verses 66-71 between Moses and the Israelites about sacrificing a special cow. Al-Baqarah is full of incidents like this one, that refer to the books that Christians call the Old Testament (OT), so in reviewing Al-Baqarah this post will focus on the varying ways that the Qur'an quotes, reshapes, references, and reinvents the OT.

Before that, let's back up slightly and talk about Al-Baqarah as a whole. It is the longest surah by far, comprising about one twelfth of the Qur'an, and having 286 verses. It covers a huge range of topics, including theology, law, history, cosmology, and spirituality. It also contains one of the most important verses in the whole Muslim tradition, the Pedestal Verse:

God, there is no god but He, the Living, the Self-Subsisting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. Unto Him belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and whatsoever is on the earth. Who is there who may intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows that which is before them and that which is behind them. And they encompass nothing of His Knowledge, save what He wills. His Pedestal embraces the heavens and the earth. Protecting them tires Him not, and He is the Exalted, the Magnificent. (2:255)

The Pedestal Verse is one of the first verses that Muslims memorize, is often recited when setting out on a journey, and can be found on the walls of many mosques and homes. And you can see why--it's a beautiful description of the nature of God, and of God's majesty and power over creation, and his ability to protect it. As a Christian, though, I often find the Qur'an's vision of God to be missing a key element--love.

The Bible frequently treats God as a lover, who is passionate about the covenant people, often to the point of jealousy. So far in my reading of the Qur'an, I haven't encountered this metaphor, or any sense of God's love for humanity--except for God's compassion and mercy, which comes up at the beginning of each surah of the Qur'an, all of which begin: In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.* Instead of love, the Qur'an seems to emphasize God's justice and power. To my Arminian mind, it reads a little like a parody of Calvinism. (This is all premature of course--I've only read about a sixth of the book so far!)

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The Qur'an draws on the Old Testament regularly and in a variety of ways, but in general it does one of two things with the OT text:

1. In some cases, the Qur'an will paraphrase, repurpose, and/or expand an event from the OT. So far in my readings, the story is never a direct quotation, and is typically used to make some kind of point that would have been outside the scope of the original text. 
2. Often, though, the Qur'an will simply take characters from the OT and make completely original uses of them. The characters' essential traits are often familiar, but the events of the stories are entirely new. Sometimes, the characters are named, without any story to speak of at all--they simply appear as names to make a rhetorical point.

De Geschiedenis van Adam en Eva (detail), Jan Breughel de Jonge, Wikimedia

A good example of #1 is the story of Adam and the naming of the animals. Here's the OT version: 

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (Genesis 2:18-20, NRSV)

Here's the Qur'an's version: 

And when thy Lord said to the angels, “I am placing a viceregent upon the earth,” they said, “Wilt Thou place therein one who will work corruption therein, and shed blood, while we hymn Thy praise and call Thee Holy?” He said, “Truly I know what you know not.” And He taught Adam the names, all of them. Then He laid them before the angels and said, “Tell me the names of these, if you are truthful.” They said, “Glory be to Thee! We have no knowledge save what Thou hast taught us. Truly Thou art the Knower, the Wise.” He said, “Adam, tell them their names.” And when he had told them their names He said, “Did I not say to you that I know the unseen of the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you disclose and what you used to conceal?” And when We said to the angels, “Prostrate unto Adam,” they prostrated, save Iblīs. He refused and waxed arrogant, and was among the disbelievers. (2:30-34, "The Cow")

As you can see, there is a shared story element--the first man, Adam, reciting the names of every living creature--but the context, the purpose, and even the event itself, are all quite different. In the OT, Adam names the creatures himself, whereas in the Qur'an, he is merely taught the names. In the OT, the purpose of the story is to introduce Adam's loneliness and lack of a partner, whereas in the Qur'an, the story demonstrates Adam's superiority over the angels. In the OT, the context is a larger narration about the origins of God's creation and the expulsion of the first humans from paradise, whereas in the Qur'an, the context is a demonstration of God's superiority and sovereignty over all.

Adam Honored by Angels, Persian Miniature c. 1560, Wikimedia

There are probably less radically altered stories than this one, but for the most part, the Qur'an seems to delight in taking rather small seeds of plot from the OT and growing wildly different story trees from them. 

Abraham is a key figure in the Qur'an--he will certainly merit his own entry on this blog in the coming months, if I can find the time--and he often appears in way #2, an OT character plucked from the original and given new things to do in a new text. Here's a pair of verses where he appears in in this surah, with no obvious OT parallels: 

Hast thou not considered him who disputed with Abraham about his Lord because God had given him sovereignty? When Abraham said, “My Lord gives life and causes death,” he said, “I give life and cause death.” Abraham said, “Truly God brings the sun from the east. Bring it, then, from the west.” Thus was he who disbelieved confounded. And God guides not wrongdoing people. (2:258, "The Cow") 

And when Abraham said, “My Lord, show me how Thou givest life to the dead,” He said, “Dost thou not believe?” He said, “Yea, indeed, but so that my heart may be at peace.” He said, “Take four birds and make them be drawn to thee. Then place a piece of them on every mountain. Then call them: they will come to thee in haste. And know that God is Mighty, Wise. (2:260, "The Cow)

We see the essential character of Abraham, at once trusting profoundly in God in 2:258 (as he does in the OT when he trusts God's promise of land and descendants), but also challenging God (as he does when he bargains with God in the OT). Yet these specific tales, of Abraham's dispute with a man doubting God's sovereignty, and of God resurrecting some birds as proof of the final resurrection, occur nowhere in the OT, not even in highly altered form.

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What are we to make of this? Islamic tradition, and the Qur'an itself, holds that the Bible as Christians know it today is in part a revelation from God, but that Christians and Jews have corrupted it:

So woe unto those who write the book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a paltry price. So woe unto them for what their hands have written and woe unto them for what they earn. (2:79, "The Cow")

(This verse and others like it--e.g., 7:157, "The Heights"--are often interpreted to refer to intentional alterations to the Bible, made to remove supposed prophecies about the coming of Mohammed, God's final prophet.) So one way to see this relationship is the Qur'an restoring the corrupted message of the older text: the altered stories and the new ones are what ought to have appeared in the old. Another way to understand these two texts is to propose, as many have, that there were alternative, unrecorded traditions about OT figures circulating by word of mouth throughout the near east in antiquity, and the Qur'an simply references and makes use of these existing stories.

In his 2010 book, The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext, Gabriel Said Reynolds argues that the Bible is key to interpreting the Qur'an. He even goes so far as to say that the Bible is a better guide to Qur'ranic interpretation than the life of Mohammad, which is both the traditional and secular academic norm for interpreting the book: "[T]he Qur’an ... should not be read in conversation with what came after it (tafsir [traditional early interpretations including accounts of the life of Mohammad]) but with what came before it (Biblical literature)" (pg. 13).

In Reynolds' somewhat radical view, the tafsir, the early interpreters of the Qur'an, appear to be inventing episodes in the life of Mohammad in order to explain the text. These interpreters claim an unbroken chain of memory from the time of the prophet centuries earlier, but appear to have forgotten a number of highly salient details, such as the purpose of the mysterious unconnected letters at the beginning of a number of surahs (pg. 19), or who the Sabians, a group who are named alongside Muslims, Christians, ad Jews, actually were (pg. 20). Reynolds casts doubt on the tafsir as reliable sources, and points us to the material that we know pre-exists the Qur'an as a means of divining its meanings: the Bible.

At all events, it is clear that the OT is a valuable resource for understanding and engaging with the Qur'an. If nothing else, it provides a place to compare and contrast story elements and recurring characters, which makes for a fine way of investigating the author's purposes and meanings. If a story has been altered, we can ask: what has been changed, and to what end? If OT characters appear in the Qur'an, are they recognizable or not? What rhetorical, theological, or historical purposes do they serve? Regardless of whether Reynolds is right about the reliability of the early interpreters of the Qur'an, the OT has proved a great place to go for thinking in depth about Islam's scripture.

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*This formulation is called the Basmala, and it's actually missing from the ninth surah, which has led some to speculate that it may have originally been the second half of surah eight. Psalms 9 and 10 in the Old Testament are like this--together, they appear to form an acrostic poem, in which every other line begins with successive letters of the alphabet.

Bibliography:

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

Reynolds, Gabriel Said. The Qur'an and Its Biblical Subtext. London: Routledge, 2010.