The Qurʾan is only lines inscribed between two covers; it does not speak; people only utter it.
ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, quoted in Ernst, How to Read the Qurʾan, 63
The text lives only by coming into contact with another text (with context). Only at the point of this contact between texts does a light flash … joining a given text to a dialogue.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Methodology, 162
⋅⋅⋅I⋅⋅⋅
She frowned but did not turn away. She was an elderly Egyptian American Qurʾan teacher at a suburban mosque in North Carolina. I interviewed her in the summer of 2008, when I worked as a researcher for a project unrelated to this book, which examined American Muslim responses to terrorism. She was taken aback when I awkwardly asked, “What do you think about some Muslim radicals claiming that their actions are inspired by the Qurʾan?” “Well,” she said, “my Qurʾan never told me to be a terrorist. My Qurʾan never told me to kill other people.”1
As the teacher spoke, her voice stressed “my Qurʾan” and “never told me.” Her facial expression reminded me of the Qurʾanic verse “ʿabasa wa tawalla,” or “he frowned and turned away,” where God admonishes the Prophet Muhammad for turning away from a blind man who interrupted him during a meeting with a group of notables.2 I developed the habit of hearing reminders of the Qurʾan in the verbal and facial expressions of my conversation partners while conducting research for this book, which I carried out from 2008 to 2010.3 The ethnographic part of this exploration entailed paying attention to how American Muslims spoke and made the Qurʾan resonate with their realities.
I doubt my interviewee was aware of how her response embodied, for this particular listener, a reminder from the Qurʾan. The rest of her answer, however, was an unmistakable sign of the problematic place Muslims and their sacred book had come to occupy in the United States in the decade after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. My question touched on a raw nerve of her post-9/11 experience: in this moment, she must have felt that she was, yet again, conversing with a person who connected her religion with terrorism.
Our exchange took place within the context of incessant controversies ensnaring Muslims and the Qurʾan. One of those flare-ups occurred in early 2007—one year before the teacher and I spoke—when the first Muslim member of Congress, Representative Keith Ellison (Democrat of Minnesota), was sworn into office. During the ceremony Ellison placed his hand on a copy of the Qurʾan. This symbolic act stirred a ruckus of negative voices. Dennis Prager, a conservative columnist, declared that “insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible.”4 Several other pundits and politicians followed suit, with Representative Virgil Goode (R–VA) declaring that Ellison’s “use of the Koran” during the swearing-in ceremony violated “the values and beliefs traditional to the United States.”5 One of many opinions in defense of Ellison’s choice was issued by David Kuo, a former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He poked fun at the outrage: “So the Bible is America’s holiest book? Was there a vote? Did Oprah decide? Was it Jefferson?”6 Of course, in Ellison’s case, it was, in part, Thomas Jefferson: the congressman used a copy of an English translation of the Qurʾan that had once belonged to the third President. Ellison’s adaptation of Jefferson’s Qurʾan was astute. It provided an immediate retort to his critics by demonstrating that the Qurʾan had indeed been part of American history, its tradition of inclusivity, since at least the beginning of the republic.7
Still, what makes a religious book American? Surely it is not Oprah’s Book Club! After all, the Qurʾan is, in some ways, foreign: it originated in a faraway past, it is in a foreign language, and its believers in distant times and places have understood it in ways that are surely quite at odds with current American sensibilities. It even looks unlike most texts that contemporary readers encounter: it is not a textbook, novel, or collection of stories; it is not structured to convey one or a series of unfolding stories from a beginning to an end. Its appearance is different because it is a premodern and oral text (another example of an old oral text is the Iliad). Its first existence was as a recitation; the Arabic word qurʾan literally means “recitation.” It is indelibly linked with the figure of the Prophet Muhammad, who received it, fragment by fragment, over the course of twenty-three years, from around 610 to 632 C.E., and recited it to his community in Mecca, Medina, and beyond. The written text of the Qurʾan is based on the traditions of oral recitations that originate with the Prophet and his disciples and which were continued through centuries by subsequent generations of religious students and teachers. Also significant is that, for most Muslims, proper understanding of the Qurʾan is impossible without simultaneous engagements with other texts, primarily the Hadith, written down—but also memorized and orally recounted—narrations of the Prophet’s sayings and actions, as well as works of formal exegesis, or tafsir.8
Of course, most other American scriptures, like the Bible and the Sutras, are also foreign imports: they, too, originated in distant pasts, have existed as oral and written texts, and are linked to extensive traditions of interpretations, some of which, from contemporary points of view, have been quite awkward—think about patriarchy and slavery, which until very recently in the United States and other places were taken for granted and scripturally supported realities. To post-9/11 critics of American Muslims, however, these facts did not matter. The Qurʾan’s foreign appearance confirmed to them what they had been implying all along: that Muslims were somehow out of place in the fabric of American life. For American Muslims this widely circulated common sense presented a quintessential post-9/11 Catch-22: without the Qurʾan, they could not be Muslim, but their allegiance to it fueled speculations about whether or not they were really American.
My book cuts through this dilemma. It is based on the perspective that the Qurʾan, like other imported scriptures, is American because millions of Americans, who in this case happen to be Muslim, have made it so. How have they been making it theirs and, therefore, American? The answer to this question is necessarily lengthy. A simple declaration—“the Qurʾan is American”—would not suffice, even if it is enacted symbolically in the U.S. Congress. Crucially, it would not explain how it is American. It would also come across as ungainly and, for most of my Muslim readers, jarring—it would go against the grain of their theological sensibilities, according to which every word of the Qurʾan belongs to God.9
Still, if the Qurʾan is God’s, how could the Egyptian American teacher say “my Qurʾan?” Her articulation was indeed theologically awkward. But it was not unique: I have heard and read variations of this phrase many times.10 What prompted her expression, which was instinctual rather than formally theological, was her intimate affinity with the sacred text. The pain audible in her voice and visible in her frown was a reaction to a possible affront to the book of God. That anguish was deep precisely because it was her Qurʾan, and even a hint at its disparagement was a potential offense to her very humanity, which she had been modeling on her sacred text. In this sense, her reaction would resonate with many Muslims, who might recall that ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr, a wife of the Prophet, described him as “the Qurʾan walking.” To embody the Qurʾan, as it was lived by the Prophet, is the height of aspiration for any Muslim.
⋅⋅⋅II⋅⋅⋅
This book focuses on the human side of scripture. More specifically, it examines American Muslims’ cultural translations of the Qurʾan. It explores how they have been interpreting their sacred text to make sense of it and their experiences. I wrote it for several overlapping audiences: those who would like to learn about American Muslims, as well as those who are interested in the Qurʾan. My subject is at once broad and focused, which prompts me to bridge diverse fields and methodologies. This book, therefore, might be particularly useful to undergraduate and graduate students who study religious people and texts through diverse courses and perspectives, including anthropology, history, religion, and sociology. My colleagues, academics who teach such courses, might also benefit from how this book employs theoretical approaches from the disciplines and fields of rhetoric, history of ideas, memory studies, and religion in public life. As much as possible, I attempted to keep theories behind my analysis just below the surface of the text. Sometimes, however, I chose to highlight them (the first such resurfacing occurs in the introduction, most obviously in section IV). This is because my central inquiries address questions that begin with the word “how,” which are difficult to address effectively without some theory.
My approach to the Qurʾan is largely anthropological, modeled after the understanding of anthropology as “the systematic inquiry into cultural concepts.”11 In the broad network of scriptural and Qurʾanic studies, I aim to contribute to the ongoing shift toward the examination of sacred texts as they are lived and embodied by human beings. Exemplary here are William A. Graham’s Beyond the Written Word, Vincent L. Wimbush’s Theorizing Scriptures, and Rudolph T. Ware’s The Walking Qurʾan. Among books that provided the initial impetus to my study are Farid Esack’s Qurʾan, Liberation and Pluralism, which analyzes South African informal Muslim exegeses in the era of the antiapartheid struggle, as well as Allen Dwight Callahan’s The Talking Book, Bruce Lawrence’s The Qurʾan: A Biography, and Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi’s Debating Muslims, which emphasize the dialogical nature of human engagements with canonical texts. In the field of American religion, my analysis is particularly indebted to Susan Friend Harding’s Book of Jerry Falwell. In the area of American Islam, my work belongs to an ensuing wave of scholarship that moves toward the study of American Muslim discourses and intellectual history. Notable here are Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s A History of Islam in America, Juliane Hammer’s American Muslim Women, Zareena Grewal’s Islam is a Foreign Country, and Moustafa Bayoumi’s How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?
The subject of American Muslim engagements with the Qurʾan is vast. For example, the earliest existing American document that contains a possible Qurʾanic exegesis is the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said (1770–1864), a West African Muslim who found himself enslaved in the Carolinas.12 He wrote it in Arabic in 1831, around the time of Nat Turner’s rebellion. He framed the story of his life by first writing down from memory the Qurʾanic chapter 67 (“al-mulk” or “Sovereignty”). This sura—“sura” is the Qurʾanic term for a “chapter”—states that God is the ultimate master of all creation. And Ibn Said likely used it to make sense of his American experience of slavery, his forced submission to a human master in a foreign land. While Qurʾanic, his response was also American: it resonated with broader African American religious discourses of his time. Some twenty years later, for instance, Reverend Jeremiah Wesley Loguen, a former slave and a Methodist minister, would echo Ibn Said’s declaration by proclaiming at an antislavery meeting in upstate New York, “I owe my freedom to the God who made me.”13
Ibn Said’s written commentary on his American life was understandably indirect. Writing by slaves at that time was typically seen as subversive; after Turner’s uprising it became prohibited. That might have been a reason why he rendered his interpretation as a mere scriptural hint. From a broader perspective, however, his choice also demonstrates that Muslims have been bringing the Qurʾan to comment on their lives in a variety of ways. Some of them are officially recognized as exegeses, or works of tafsir. Other types of interpretation, the absolute majority, are too elusive to be classified. And all of them are cultural translations: they bring texts from the past into the present. Because of this, any interpretation, formal or otherwise, is also a work of memory.
Muslims everywhere memorize, recite, and quote the Qurʾan routinely. While recitation of portions of its text is a necessary part of their daily prayers, the Qurʾan’s influence goes further: just as many Christians insert biblical phrases into their everyday speech, many Muslims habitually intersperse their words with Qurʾanic words and phrases, such as “in shaʾ allah” (literally, “if God wills,” often translated as “God willing”), which comes from Qurʾan 18:24. Such utterings are the same everywhere. Yet, every time they are spoken, they acquire distinct meanings derived from the context of their speakers: “if God wills” only makes sense when it is attached to a specific situation. The same holds true for formal recitations of the Qurʾan, whose purpose is to faithfully and precisely replicate how the text has been recited by generations of Muslims, going all the way to the Prophet.14 As with everyday expressions, such canonical recitations become meaningful to their human speakers and hearers within their contexts.
I witnessed an example of this process in January 2009 during my research at a large Muslim congregation in western New York, which coincided with one of Israel’s massive military assaults on the Gaza Strip, “Operation Cast Lead.” Members of this American community were absorbed in the event, monitoring it via satellite channels and online—and some through phone conversations and e-mails with relatives in Palestine. They discussed it incessantly, sharing a collective shock and grief over the killing of many hundreds of human beings, overwhelmingly civilian, during this three-week campaign, which began abruptly, on Saturday, December 27. However, the leader of this congregation, its imam, did not make any public announcements about it for six days. One of the reasons for it was that his time to speak would come exactly in six days, during his weekly Friday sermon. Another reason was that he needed to prepare himself and his community for how to speak about it. For instance, since 9/11, this congregation had developed close relationships with neighboring synagogues, and its imam did not want an international conflict to devastate their local friendships. Moreover, the community itself was not monolithic: some 40 percent of it were Arab Americans, many of whom thought that the crisis in Palestine was the most important issue of the moment; others, while sharing this pain, had other concerns as well.
Just because the imam did not make any official statements about the crisis does not mean that he did not comment on it. Every day he kept leading collective prayers and reciting the Qurʾan, and his commentary was embedded in what and how he chose to recite. Day after day he kept highlighting passages that spoke to the intertwined sacred histories of Muslims and Jews. By speaking from the Qurʾan and without adding a word of his own, he reminded his congregation that Jews and Muslims belong to the same tradition of revelation, which comes from the same divine source. One of the Qurʾanic utterings he repeatedly brought in, however, had—on the surface—nothing to do with Muslims or Jews, or the modern political entities called “Israel” and “Palestine.” It was sura 94, “al-sharh” (“Consolation”). Many Muslims know it by heart, because it is one of the Qurʾan’s shortest suras and is typically memorized in childhood. It had been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in Mecca, before he was forced to migrate to Medina, at a time of serious hardship. Its consolation was directed to him. So how could it comment on a twenty-first-century conflict and speak to some Muslims in western New York?
During a month I spent in the area, I began most of my days by joining a group of men at this congregation in their dawn prayers. On one such morning, during the first week of Operation Cast Lead, I saw the answer to how the Qurʾan becomes a local sacred text. As the imam was reciting sura 94 yet again, I furtively looked right and left to see the faces of men praying next to me—and saw tears. They wept while hearing in Arabic the lines they had heard thousands of times before: “Yet hardship will bring ease. Indeed hardship must bring ease.”15 Their tears signaled that, in that moment, they heard the Qurʾan speak to the anguish they felt during those days. This was a moment when they—with their senses—were engaged in a heartfelt and embodied dialogue with the book of God.
⋅⋅⋅III⋅⋅⋅
Mikhail Bakhtin, a linguist whose thought is central to my analysis, observed that “all language is collective” and dialogical. It is saturated with contextually specific meanings shared by participants of particular collectives, which change depending on when, where, and in whose company they are.16 Words—and sacred texts—acquire different shades of meanings in different settings. This means that the overwhelming majority of moments and cases of the Qurʾan becoming an American text are barely noticeable. This book, therefore, is a series of compromises that make this subject more accessible, for my readers and me.
My first compromise is that I largely, but not completely, stay away from less tangible cases of the Qurʾan’s American cultural translations, such as Ibn Said’s elusive exegesis or interpretations that appear as mere recitations. (The two examples, by the way, are related: Ibn Said’s was a written-down recitation and, as such, it was an interpretation expressed exclusively as an evocation.) I also sidestep the subject of the Qurʾan’s technical translations, books that aim to transmit it into written English in its entirety. I avoid such seemingly obvious examples of cultural translation for two reasons, which have to do with my goal of highlighting American contexts of the Qurʾan as a living text. First, the genre of written translation, by its nature, conceals the agencies and contexts of translators. Although some of them try to overcome this inherent limitation of their art, their successes are at best marginal—sometimes literally so, because their observable commentaries typically appear in the margins or in the footnotes of their books, which are officially never theirs to begin with.17 My second reason for omitting such works is more significant: written translations also conceal the agency and contexts of their audiences.
Instead, I analyze more obvious examples. At the center of my book are interpretations developed by four prominent American Muslim public intellectuals: Fazlur Rahman (1919–1988), a Pakistani-American academic; Amina Wadud (b. 1952), a feminist scholar and activist; Warith Deen Mohammed (1933–2008), an African American community leader; and Hamza Yusuf (b. 1960), arguably the most popular American Muslim preacher of the post-9/11 era. These personalities were highly influential and represented diverse, yet interrelated, streams in American Muslim discourses. What matters most for my analysis, however, is that Rahman was a writer, Wadud was both a writer and a preacher, and Mohammed and Yusuf were almost exclusively preachers. This selection of case studies, therefore, allows me to analyze writing and preaching as two distinct modalities of cultural translation.
My examples limit my exploration to the period between the mid-1960s and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The first marker in this chronology is 1965, the year of the Immigration Act, which made it possible for millions of non-Europeans to immigrate to the United States. Over time, they transformed this country and, in the words of Diane Eck, a scholar of American religious diversity, created “a new religious America,” where being Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish was no longer the only acceptable way of being American.18 Among these immigrants there were millions of Muslims, who joined the ranks of previously existing communities and established new and more numerous institutions. Along with this institutional growth came dramatic expansion in the depth and range of Muslim intellectual production. The year 1965 was also the year of the assassination of Malcolm X, a watershed event in the history of African American Muslims, whose contributions have always been crucial in broader American Muslim life. On the other side of this timeline is the first decade after September 11, 2001, during which American Muslims emerged as their country’s new problematic minority, a status they inherited from other religious and ethnic groups, such as American Catholics and Jews, as well as African and Asian Americans.19
The disadvantage of this chronology is that it leaves out countless other stories. It is balanced out, however, by the fact that American Muslims in this era of globalization were formulating their Qurʾanic interpretations while being in constant contact with international Muslim conversations. At the same time, their expressions of specifically American concerns were now more pronounced as well. In part it was because they relied on the discursive legacies of previous generations of their American coreligionists, those who had been brought here as slaves or arrived as immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another reason behind it was that this was also the period when other religious minorities had gained—or were, contemporaneously with Muslims, acquiring—the recognition as integral participants in American life. This was the period when religious diversity, as a concept, became an American common sense. This combination of factors allows me to approach American Muslim discourses in light of both global and local trends, as well as the experiences of other American religious groups.
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Rahman, Wadud, Mohammed, and Yusuf were public intellectuals, which means that their efforts had practical orientations. Through their written and oral rhetoric, they taught their readers and listeners how to make sense of themselves as Muslims. Key in this process was how they directed their readers and listeners to remember the Qurʾan. Yet, every remembering is a re-membering—a re-collection, re-arrangement of the past by those who bring it back to life in light of their own contexts and times. In addition to their American settings, therefore, what these four interpreters shared was that they were modern human beings who translated the Qurʾan, a premodern text, across time to make it resonant with their modern audiences.
The concept of time is central in any contemporary exegesis of a premodern scripture. Interpreters render such texts understandable by infusing their words with connotations they share with their audiences, including their perceptions of time. Embedded in this process are cultural translations across time-bound concepts, those of premodern texts and their modern believers. Most often, however, this aspect of interpretation goes unnoticed—for what is more commonsensical and, therefore, unremarkable than time? And yet, there is nothing more contextually specific than common senses.
Consider here an example of an almost identical articulation of time by two individuals, Vladimir Nabokov and Fazlur Rahman, who did not know one another and had few things in common, except for being contemporaries and therefore, in a sense, co-sharers of time. In his 1951 autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov, a secular (at least on the surface) Russian novelist and poet, described time as a “colored spiral in a small ball of glass.”20 Some thirty years later, Rahman, an Indian-born religious scholar, depicted time as a spiral as well: it was a “spiral,” he insisted, and “not a cycle.”21 He made this statement in Major Themes of the Qurʾan, published in Chicago in 1980.
The two writers had different reasons behind their formulations. Nabokov conjured this image to make sense of his personal experience of the passage of time. Rahman used it to explain the Qurʾan in “terms adequate for the needs of contemporary man.” The scriptural notion of time, he wrote matter-of-factly, was not cyclical, because “cyclic motion is incomparable with any purposefulness; it belongs more to the world of merry-go-rounds.”22 What he meant by “purposefulness” was progress, which was a predominant twentieth-century way of thinking about human history.
Rahman’s description of the Qurʾanic notion of time as resonant with the modern idea of progress, however, was not as self-evident as he presented it to be. It is just as likely that this seventh-century—and therefore premodern—text’s conception of time is cyclical (at least in its notion of human historical time). The Qurʾan’s recollections about past events direct its audiences toward cultivation of piety—and being pious is always in the present. The Qurʾan tells stories from the past to express recurring patterns of human behavior. Crucial among those, it keeps reminding its listeners and readers, is the human propensity toward forgetfulness—most important, people’s tendency to forget about their dependence on God. Therefore, it depicts human beings and societies as going through cycles of remembrance and forgetting. During particularly rough stretches of such cycles, God sends reminders through prophets, messengers, and other inspired people. Yet, as time passes, forgetfulness returns.23 Even the community of Muhammad, whom the Qurʾan calls “the best community,” are constantly warned about the danger of disremembering, because they are merely human and thus not immune from forgetting.24
All this may suggest, as the historian Fred Donner put it, that the Qurʾan is basically an ahistorical text: it is aimed at its audiences’ present, and thus the “very concept of history is fundamentally irrelevant to [its] concerns.”25 Of course, it depends on what one means by the term “history.” Another historian, Chase Robinson, stipulated that the Qurʾan does have a historical component to its style and content. He examined how the Qurʾan recalled events of the past specifically for its first audiences, the contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad. These recollections, he proposed, delineated a history. But it was a “different kind of history,” which was told orally and with the goal of establishing a tradition. This type of an oral telling of history, Robinson explained, rhetorically created a place for the new society of believers: it confirmed to them that they were descendants of Abraham and other prophets, and taught them that they were inheritors of the lessons that God had already taught to Jews, Christians, and others. Viewed from this perspective, the Qurʾan is a document that shapes a “tradition transmitted orally”—because oral recollections that establish a lineage tend to appear in “hourglass” shapes, with stories “clustering around formative (frequently legendary) origins and more recent generations (usually fathers and grandfathers).”26
Robinson’s characterization of the Qurʾanic method of history telling was a twist on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher. From Ricoeur’s perspective, memory is a broad category that includes both written and oral modes of remembering. All memory, whether oral or written, confronts the fundamental contradiction: it represents in the present the past that obviously no longer exists. How writers and speakers perform such representations, however, is fundamentally distinct. As William Graham, another follower of Ricoeur, explained, “where [oral] memory collapses time spans, writing tends to fix events temporally and heightens the sense of their distinctiveness as well as their ‘pastness,’ or separation from the present and the individual person.”27
Writing distances the past from its readers because it fossilizes it as an image through conglomerations of written words. Most important, however, is that writers perform their remembrances in isolation from their readers, and readers consume such works in their own separate times and places. This means that writers and readers typically do not remember together: they are not engaged in direct and simultaneous dialogues—except when a writer reads out loud her or his text in front of an actual audience. In such moments, writers stop being writers and become storytellers. This metamorphosis represents the difference between writing and speaking memory. Public speakers, including storytellers and preachers, carry out remembrances right in front of their audiences; even recorded versions of live speeches cannot fully compromise this sense of immediacy. At the same time, in oral performances, listeners are never passive because listening is, by its nature, instantaneously dialogical. Through such dialogues, speech reinfuses the past into the present more naturally.28
The Qurʾan is an oral text. Its existence has been primarily as a recited, listened-to, and retold composition, where sound is inseparable from meaning. When it comes to books, this is a peculiarly premodern characteristic. One of the signs of modernity is the emergence of printed books and mass literacy, which spurred the practice of reading texts silently. Before then, the act of reading was different—it actually entailed pronouncing words out loud.29 Because of this, Rahman’s stipulation about the Qurʾan’s progressive, and spiral-like, presentation of historical movement through time says more about him—and Nabokov and other moderns—than it does about the Qurʾan. To explain what this means, I have to refer to yet another historian, Reinhart Koselleck, whose seminal work, Futures Past, offers a retrospective retelling of what moderns and premoderns meant by the term “history.”
Koselleck’s central insight is straightforward: human beings derive “their terminology” of speaking and thinking “about history, [and] specifically historical time,” from “[their] nature and their surroundings.”30 When these change, so do their perceptions of time. Modern technologies of telling and managing time—which swept most of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—were instrumental in the emergence of modern ways of living and management of nature, including human nature. Premodern human beings told time and scheduled their lives through physical nature, by relying on daylight and the change of seasons. They, unlike us, were not surrounded by clocks. We, unlike them, embody artificial time, time calculated through instruments. Our days begin, for example, when schools, shops, and factories open at particular times dictated by clocks and other machines. Therefore, we have a different sense of time. And the word “time,” although it can be found in various premodern languages and texts, to us means something different from what it did before the advent of modernity: “time” looks the same—it is composed of the same letters or symbols—but it is sensed differently.31
In addition, according to Koselleck, premodern perceptions of history followed two basic and interrelated models. The first way of making sense of the past, present, and future was based closely on an organic model: premodern people perceived history as moving along recurring rounds of growth and decline, akin to the movement of agricultural cycles. It is possible that the original Qurʾanic concept of time belonged to this category. The second model perceived historical time as a process of decline from some spectacular peak, such as the time of God’s tangible intervention in human history, as in the coming of Christ or the revelation of the Qurʾan.32 According to this perspective, if an improvement was noted in some element of the human condition, it did not encompass much, and from a practical angle what mattered most was the overall inevitability of decline. This notion is reflected in a saying of the Prophet: “The best people are those living in my generation, then those coming after them, and then those [of the generation] coming after.”33 As the generations of Hadith collectors recalled the Prophet’s statement about his own and the next three generations, they made sense of it in ways that reflected Koselleck’s second type of premodern time telling. The Qurʾan, understood as God’s final revelation, was the summit of human history. After it, as time passed, humans would be increasingly removed from it, and the task of the following generations would be to resist decline, which in the end would occur anyway, until the coming of the messiah.34
Of course, the actual story is more complicated, which is why Koselleck’s two models are interrelated. While speaking about decline, Muslim premodern thinkers were also teaching about the process of constant renewal. Through this combination, they re-membered the notion of decline into a powerful teaching tool that highlighted the indispensability of renewal.35 This, in turn, underscored the importance of Muslim religious authorities, who served as guides to the revelations’ proper rememberings and reimplementations. Their merger of the cyclical and decline models of time transformed it into a spiral as well—of a downward variety, of course.
From this perspective, it appears that Rahman, based on his modern perception of time, merely reoriented the traditional, premodern spiral into a modern one: it had a similar underlying logic, where revelation and its renewed remembrance were key, except now this logic supported the sense of time as moving progressively into better futures. And, like his premodern predecessors, he wrote about time pedagogically, as a strategy of teaching practical lessons. For an exegesis to be practical, it has to be resonant with its time-bound contexts and understandings. Rahman’s engagement with the question of time, therefore, was not unique: other modern Muslim interpreters of the Qurʾan, including those whose works I explore in this book, do it routinely—even when they do not address it directly; even when they do it naturally, without reflection—whenever they explain the Qurʾan for their modern audiences.
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What I just wrote previews of some of my book’s analysis: all of its case studies address the question of the Qurʾan’s translation across time. Chapter 1 delves into Rahman’s writings, most centrally his Major Themes of the Qurʾan, to explore challenges interpreters face when they attempt to make the scripture resonant with sensibilities and dilemmas of their modern audiences. In addition, it places Rahman’s work within the context of the post-1965 history of Islam’s cultural translation into an American religion, an ongoing process that obviously had begun much earlier. Chapter 2 examines Amina Wadud’s exegesis, found in her books and sermons. It zeroes in on a practical issue, the concept of gender equality, which highlights why strategies of crossing time matter. Gender, after all, is a modern concept, which, like time, has the tendency of appearing constant. As Wadud put it, although at the time of the Qurʾan’s revelation “gender was not a category of thought,” by the end of the twentieth century it became unavoidable: the “absence of such a category of thought,” she observed, “was not sexist at the time of revelation, but it is palpably so today.”36 Wadud’s choice of the words “sexist” and “palpably” hints at the purpose of my exploration of her work, which goes further than gender per se: it considers the notion of gender equality as an integral component of her American Muslim contemporaries’ common sense of justice, including, for many of them, the sense of what it meant in the Qurʾan. Similarly, chapters 3 and 4, which focus on Warith Deen Mohammed and Hamza Yusuf’s sermons, examine deeper connotations in American Muslims’ Qurʾan-based discussions on race and politics. In chapter 3 that deeper subject is the African American concept of redemption, which W. D. Mohammed articulated as Qurʾanic and without which the Qurʾan cannot be a harmoniously African American scripture. In chapter 4, it is the dynamics of cultural politics, the give-and-take between religious and civic values, where American Muslim articulations of their scripture are obviously vital.
Throughout the book, I aim to highlight the dialogical nature of American Muslims’ engagements with the Qurʾan, which they have carried out in conversation with other, past and present, Muslim authorities. In chapter 1, the dialogue I feature is between Rahman and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), an Indian poet and public intellectual. Chapter 2 examines Wadud’s exegesis as a continuation of the interpretive methodology charted by Rahman, with help from Iqbal. Chapter 3 offers a case study of a sermon by one of W. D. Mohammed’s close disciples, Imam Faheem Shuaibe. Chapter 4 incorporates close analysis of reflections by some of Yusuf’s regular listeners.
The subject of all these chapters is American tafsir. Literally, tafsir means “explaining” the Qurʾan. I use it in this straightforward sense, which broadens its scope significantly—and which may appear unusual for some of my Muslim and academic readers, who are used to seeing this word applied to works of formal exegesis, written texts produced by specialists, mufassirun, who adhere to particular, highly specialized rules. Typically, when authors of formal tafsirs analyze a given scriptural passage, they can comment on its possible meanings only after providing evidence of the time and occasion in which it was revealed, noting its variant readings and determining whether or not that passage had been overruled by another scriptural uttering (a process called naskh, abrogation).37 If such a procedure is not followed, other scriptural authorities are readily available to dismiss the offenders as not real exegetes. Thus, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, a fifteenth-century Egyptian interpreter, famously dismissed the philosophically oriented tafsir of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, a thirteenth-century Persian, as having “everything [in it] except tafsir.”38 Suyuti’s opinion made sense: it was a case of one Muslim authority casting aside the work of a competing exegete. Less understandable, from my perspective, is the academic tendency to dismiss and therefore fail to investigate a wide array of informal and differently produced Qurʾanic interpretations. One of my goals, therefore, is to prompt my colleagues to look beyond such officially recognized tafsirs, in any setting.
The people whose exegeses I explore did not produce formal tafsirs and avoided this term when they described their work—which, among other things, helped them circumvent the bitter contestations over who could serve as exclusively authoritative voices of the scripture. Rahman and Wadud wrote their explanations of the Qurʾan in a different, contemporary and academic, genre that allowed them to navigate around the rules of formal tafsir. Their writings communicated the Qurʾan’s meanings to wider audiences, beyond the narrow circles of professional exegetes, which is why they had broader significance. W. D. Mohammed and Yusuf did not call what they did tafsir either (although Mohammed’s students used it), because they merely preached; Wadud, of course, was also a preacher. Their preaching, however, was exegetical. And it was precisely because they explained the scripture though preaching that their oral tafsir was influential: it was highly flexible and immediately resonant with their listeners. As such, it belonged to the vast vernacular field of spoken articulations of the Qurʾan.
At the core of this book is an approach to the Qurʾan as a spoken text. This idea is not new. William Graham’s Beyond the Written Word is my study’s most notable precursor. His book, however, contains a telling—and, for me, productive—discrepancy. Graham emphasized that religious scriptures often serve as “the sacred spoken word.” He explained that scriptures become “spoken” when they are recited and retold in official and everyday speech, as in preaching. He illustrated this broad definition with examples from Protestant Christian preaching. But then, when it came to the Qurʾan, he addressed it primarily as a “recited text”: he stopped short of exploring it as a spoken, rather than recited, scripture.39 My book goes beyond the recited Qurʾan. It examines how the Qurʾan becomes a spoken text when it enters Muslims’ everyday speech, which is shaped in dialogues with their authoritative speakers, such as preachers.
The Qurʾan speaks only when it comes into contact with other speakers. Its text, which is marked by its orality, highlights how it functioned as a discourse during the time of its revelation, or, academically speaking, formation. One of its central stylistic features is polysemy, an ability to convey multitudes of meanings through a single word or phrase. During the Qurʾan’s formative period, its polysemy served to connect it with collective memories of its first listeners. The Qurʾan aimed to reform their lives, which meant that they had to hear it, understand its lessons as speaking to the very depth of who they were. This is why the Qurʾan addressed them through a language it shared with them, a type of Arabic specific to their time and place. This language went beyond shallow definitions of linguistics: it embodied their concepts and common senses, which, by articulating them anew, it attempted to reshape.40
To truly speak, in any context, the Qurʾan has to touch upon what cannot be said easily. That is why this book examines both immediate and deeper American Muslim notions—or, rather, senses—of justice, race, and politics, which are always specific to their time. I suggest that contemporary public speakers, those who speak Qurʾanic words and stories and harmonize them with their audiences’ experiences, engage their scripture’s polysemy and lend new lives to its orality. In this process, the Qurʾan, through the speech of its human agents, speaks a local language, addresses local concerns, and participates in local discourses.
Oral tafsir is a mode of speaking—and therefore embodying—the Qurʾan. Yet, to understand the strategies of cultural translation embedded in modern speaking of a premodern text, one must pay attention to written interpretations as well. This is because writers are more thorough than preachers: they do not have the freedom to gloss over points that are either too obvious or thorny, which preachers do routinely. This is why, although this book is about the Qurʾan as an American spoken sacred text, it begins with explorations of the Qurʾan’s written articulations.