A PEDAGOGY OF LISTENING

Teaching the Qur’an to Non-Muslims

Michael Birkel

In a small faculty one can teach widely. Though I was not formally trained in Islamic studies, the gross and intentional misrepresentation of Islam and of Muslims in US society compelled me to study the tradition of Islam so that I might teach a course on it with integrity. I did not, however, find the classic historical-critical method to be sufficient in this endeavor. As such, this essay builds upon my experience developing a course with a new pedagogical frame in mind: asking students to study Islam and the Qur’an on Muslims’ own terms. This pedagogical shift, I propose, is transformational for student learning and is in keeping with the overarching goals of interfaith studies as a developing field.¹

For a non-Muslim unacquainted with Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an presents challenges. It is not arranged chronologically or thematically. My initial attempts at reading the Qur’an brought to mind the biblical book of Jeremiah. If the uninitiated were parachuted down into the thick of Jeremiah, they would encounter divine address to the prophet, assurances of coming judgment, condemnation of idolatry, demands for social justice, words of consolation, and more—but not much in the way of a sustained argument, a narrative that could be followed, or, frequently, the identity of the rulers under castigation or other specificities as to context. A beginner would need help in order to grasp just what this text meant at the time of its composition, why it is in the scriptural canon, and what it means to current believers who read it. Like Jeremiah, the Qur’an needs introduction and accompaniment for the newcomer.

LISTENING TO THE TEXT, LISTENING TO CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP

So I turned to scholarly works on the Qur’an, most of them written by Western non-Muslims. And I was thrilled. In my years in seminary and graduate school, the historical-critical method was dominant, and I was captivated. A number of my peers in graduate school went on to participate in the famous Jesus Seminar, and although I did not ultimately find the work of that group methodologically satisfying, I continue to be excited by biblical studies.² So naturally I looked to scholarship on the Qur’an that mirrored the careful historical approach of biblical scholars. In my teaching of the Qur’an, I find it essential to address the historical context of the seventh century, to talk about what Christians and Jews were doing and thinking in that era, and to reflect on possible interactions and influences. I am intrigued, for example, by the work of the scholar Fred Donner, who proposes that the community founded by Mohammed was not the familiar Islam with firm boundaries, which he argues took many years to develop, but instead was a movement of devout monotheists from various religious traditions who took the ethical and pious demands of their faith very earnestly and who looked forward to a coming judgment. Similarly, I delight in the scholarly work of Angelika Neuwirth, whose approach combines a willingness to consider traditional Muslim understandings of the Qur’an and its origins with precise and insightful perceptions about the literary character of the Qur’anic text.

But while I enjoy reading and teaching this material, I must admit that this approach to the Qur’an largely reinforces my own predispositions as a scholar of religious texts. And while I maintain that such approaches constitute an immensely valuable approach to the understanding of a text as a concretely historical phenomenon, I have come to realize that they contribute little toward assisting my students in coming to understand their Muslim neighbors. Slowly but surely I came to the conclusion that it was just as important—no, make that more important—to introduce to my students the manner in which devoted Muslims read the Qur’an: as a living, sacred scripture, not primarily as a historical document. If one goal of education is to prepare students for life in a civil society, then the teaching of Islam should take into consideration the expressions of Islam that they are most likely to encounter.

LISTENING TO CONTEMPORARY MUSLIMS

So I felt compelled to move beyond what is done in many college and seminary settings, where the default approach to teaching the holy texts of another religious community is to import secular Western historical-critical methods. My purposes were different. Yes, I wanted my students to realize that the study of the Qur’an is, like everything else in contemporary Western scholarship, full of contention regarding the emergence and integrity of the text, and full of skepticism on every religious claim made about the text. But, because one of my primary goals was to promote understanding of living Muslims, an equally important focus of my pedagogy was on contemporary Muslims as interpreters of their own sacred book, with attention to the great variety and vitality of interpretive voices.

The difficulty lay in the fact that I could not find a book that felt right. I wanted one that attested to the wide spectrum of Muslim voices in North America. At the same time, I wanted a volume that American Muslims could read and then recognize as theirs the Islam that was portrayed. I wanted a resource that demonstrated what interfaith theorist and activist Eboo Patel calls “appreciative knowledge” that invites a positive attitude toward another religious tradition.³

Ultimately, I ended up producing such a book, with significant help from my conversation partners in the project. It was my privilege to meet with twenty-five Muslim religious leaders and scholars, women and men, Sunni and Shi’i.⁴ Some were experts in religious jurisprudence, accustomed to reading the Qur’an and looking for guidance with regard to a legal ruling. Others—and the two are by no means mutually exclusive—came with a pronounced mystical approach, seeking a deeper meaning for the mystery of the inward life and one’s relationship with the ultimate. All of my conversation partners extended a welcome to join them in a careful consideration of a passage from their sacred scripture.⁵

I frequently tell my students that, whatever they think Islam is, it is wider than that. No single voice speaks for the entire community. Here is a sample of some of what I heard from my conversation partners, my Muslim teachers:

The purpose of the human life is to identify, understand, and emulate the divine attributes of God, to know God in order to live a godlike life. Muhammad as the final prophet is the model that manifest[s] these divine attributes on earth.

The Qur’anic call for justice is a call to resist patriarchy, hegemony, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the unjust class system. The Qur’an itself is the basis for the reform and transformation of the law and the culture of Muslims toward more equality and reciprocity.

The basic rule governing the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is that of peaceful coexistence, justice, and compassion, irrespective of their religious choices.

We certainly live in a world where individuals, groups, and governments commit various forms of violence and terror, committed in the name of ideology, narrow forms of nationalism, and religion. Counteracting violence with more devastating violence enhances that vicious cycle. Little attention has been paid to finding out the root causes of violence, such as gross injustice and dehumanization of others. While religion has been abused to justify senseless and unnecessary violence, it can be constructively invoked to stem the tide of violence. The common values of revealed religions, in particular, can contribute immensely in that endeavor. It is the duty of religious leaders and scholars to clarify these values and clarify misinterpretations of scriptures not only to others but also for their own religious communities. Intrafaith dialogue is as much needed as interfaith dialogue.

Heaven and hell are not two physical places in the afterlife. Rather, heaven and hell are conditions or states that people find themselves in. When one is close to God, not physically but spiritually—having developed the divine attributes within oneself—one is in a heaven-like state. When one is detached from God, which is the meaning of sin, one is in a state of hell. Hell is not for punishment, but for reformation. God lifts up people from hell, out of that spiritual condition, when they are ready to progress to the next stage. Likewise the joys of paradise are also symbolic or metaphorical. There is no gratifying of physical desires with virgins.

When the Qur’an speaks of good versus evil, or about the God-conscious versus the hypocrites, the point is not to identify the good team and the bad team. All people have the potential for goodness and for evil. The struggle between good and evil is not an external, physical battle but a conflict within each human heart.⁶

Not all held all these views. Students discover that there is considerable difference of opinion among Muslims. Diversity in opinion is a long-standing feature of Islamic jurisprudence and was considered a divine mercy among classical Muslim scholars.

As important as the content of the Qur’an is the experience of what it feels like when believing Muslims read it.

When reading the Qur’an, one feels a sense of the overwhelming presence of God, and when one feels that, then in those moments everything else becomes irrelevant and meaningless, unimportant. On the one hand, you don’t want to turn back to creation, to anything that is less than divine, so there is a sense of profound sakeena or tranquility. You’re at rest; you don’t want to be anywhere else. You feel a sense of delight which is like nothing else. . . . That’s one feeling. There is also a feeling of incredible compassion toward everything else. You don’t want anything from anyone. . . . When one opens the Qur’an and reads the basmala, “In the name of Allah who is most merciful and ever merciful,” if one does not feel that divine mercy, then one is not reading the Qur’an.⁷

LISTENING TO STUDENTS AS THEY LISTEN

One of the great joys of producing and teaching Qur’an in Conversation was the opportunity to listen closely to my students as they encountered the foundational text of another community.

As in many places, the student body where I teach has a pronounced commitment to social justice. Students therefore appreciated one scholar’s bold engagement with the so-called wife-beating verse (4:34), as well as another’s candid discussion of racism inside and outside of the boundaries of the Muslim community. After the media’s frequent images of Muslims bent in prayer, they are surprised to read one scholar’s statement that the ritual of prayer is only a means, not an end. The goal is social justice, care for the marginalized, and common kindness. These are sacred duties. Prayer is to remind believers of what they need to take from the time of prayer into a lived life. Otherwise, outward ritual observance is only show.

Students are surprised and delighted that compassion or mercy (rahma in Arabic) emerges as a central theme, both within the Qur’an itself and among its commentators. This entry point in turn helps them to read with greater sympathy Muslims who might not be so readily labeled as progressive—and eventually to see that such labels can obscure as much as they reveal. There can be more than one way to live out a dedication to justice.

Consistently students identify the mystical commentary on the story of Moses and his encounter with the mysterious figure Khidr as one of their favorite stories.⁸ Khidr baffles Moses with his bizarre actions, which include making a hole in a boat in which they are traveling and nearly sinking it, killing a young boy whom they meet, and repairing a dilapidated wall to a town that had been inhospitable to them. Moses, the great lawgiver, is confounded by Khidr, who operates from an utterly different species of divinely inspired wisdom. To read this story in the company of Muslim scholar Maria Dakake, who was my conversation partner and guide to this passage from the Qur’an, was to read with the great spiritual masters of Islam across the centuries because she is so steeped in their wisdom.⁹ She successfully invited students into another realm of reading and seeing.

Most of my students had never heard voices of African American Muslims, who have respect for classical tradition but point out that Middle Eastern Muslims have no monopoly on interpretation, especially with regard to the lived social reality of the black community in the US. Students tend to want to be independent thinkers, but, more than that, they come to see how important it is for believers to live in that dual faithfulness to their holy text and their social reality rather than choosing one or the other. Students come to see how the Qur’an is a resource for justice. Many did not enter the course with that perspective, because the media often centers its attention on a portrayal of Muslims as backward, trapped by a time-bound scripture.

Students grappled with what it is like to be a guest of the Qur’an. How does one come to appreciative knowledge, to an inward place of openness to change while still maintaining a commitment to one’s own religious identity or secular life stance? It can be daunting to come into the presence of a text that has such power and that makes demands on its readers. This can be unnerving. The temptation is to read it as a text comfortably locked in the past rather than one that empowers readers that are committed to it as truth.

Part of the challenge for students is that many of them, as “nones” or spiritual but not religious, lack a sense of a firm religious identity of their own from which to encounter the Qur’an.¹⁰ Here my role as an educator is to assure them that if they are making an effort to engage in deep self-honesty and to use the best tools that their culture offers them, they are on firm ground. I affirm whatever life stance to which they profess adherence. At the same time I encourage them to be open to opportunities for inward growth. Dialogue is not conversion. It begins with self-knowledge.

This experience deepened my commitment to a pedagogy of listening: listening to the text, listening to interpreters, and listening to ourselves as we respond. The Qur’an gives life to Muslims. It comes to life among Muslims as they read and interpret it. Can it come to life and be life-giving to those outside the historical community of the prophet Mohammed? My experience, both as a reader and as a teacher, is that it can. For some people, this may violate their sense of propriety: a professional academic must, in their eyes, always maintain a proper emotional distance from the object of study. I feel that permitting myself to be moved by the beauty of a text is not a betrayal of my commitment to my faith or to my identity as a scholar.

LISTENING TO MY OWN EXPERIENCE: ADVICE TO TEACHERS

Some of my questions are similar to those of my students. How do I engage the Qur’an with integrity, without projecting my own values upon it? Can I offer the Qur’an the same compassion that it so frequently invokes and requires of its readers and hearers?

Reading another’s scripture can be an exercise in hospitality, which is an exchange. At its best, the giving and receiving are reciprocal and travel in both directions. Of course, I never expected to be more than a guest. I was not shopping for another religion. Boundaries between religious communities are to be honored. They don’t just keep out. They also hold together. If religion were left to majority rule, my little group called the Quakers would have been voted off the island long ago. That, I feel, would have been a loss to the human spiritual legacy.

I return to my scriptures with the echoes of the Qur’an in my ears. The stories of Joseph, of Moses, and of Mary are not the same. The Qur’an has come to inhabit my biblical world in ways that enrich my community’s texts. When someone has traveled to another land and culture and lived there for a time, the culture shock is often greater upon return to one’s once-familiar surroundings than it is upon arrival in the foreign land. The known seems less so. Narratives familiar to readers of the Bible can appear “cleaned up” in the Qur’an. Jacob is wiser, not so deceptive, more confident of providence, less self-protective. On one level I had known this before, but after a sustained period of time as a guest of the Qur’an, the messiness of Genesis strikes me more forcefully. I find myself responding to it differently, even as I continue to count the familiar landscape of the biblical account as my home.

What does it mean to acknowledge and appreciate the beauty of another’s faith? Is the beautiful also the true if God is the source and author of both? I do not feel threatened by the Qur’an’s claim to truth, but neither did I ever feel drawn to commit to it through conversion. I feel fully a member of my own religious community but (mostly) not because mine is superior. The histories of both Muslim and Christian communities are riddled with contradictions, with failures to embody their ideals. The scriptures of both contain passages that I find deeply troubling with regard to women, slavery, and apparent divine condoning of violence and cruelty.

Instead, I feel fully within my tradition and community because that is the way that I know how to get to what I sense and admire in their tradition. This is not necessarily relativism, whether new or old. Here I recall the late Roman non-Christian Symmachus, who urged toleration for his religious heritage in the face of anticipated persecution by the early Christian empire with his famous utterance that surely by one path alone it is not possible to arrive at so great a mystery.¹¹

Is it all the same grand mystery toward which we strive to seek a path? The fact that it is a mystery, beyond the powers of human utterance, compels me to admit that I cannot be sure that I know. Still, the power of mutual recognition suggests to me that it is the same mystery that beckons us all. Here I am thinking of an occasion when a Muslim said to me, “I can see your noor,” which is the Arabic word for light. Muslim spirituality speaks of an inward noor, which is a manifestation of divine presence. His light beheld my light in mutual recognition. My experiences among these generous Muslims gives rise to a desire to continue and deepen the engagement, to perceive the beauty and noor, and to be further transformed.

There is a sacred hadith: “I was a hidden treasure and desired to be known.” Is that a deep desire, imprinted into the fabric of the universe? If so, then our coming to know one another is a holy task, a participation in divine purpose.

Here, I tell my students, is where they come in. The work that resulted in Qur’an in Conversation is not the work of a trained scholar of Islam. I went and spoke with Muslims—and admittedly a very special group of them. I tell my non-Muslim students that they can do the same. I say to them, “Go and talk with your Muslim neighbors. You will experience the same depth of hospitality. It will change your life for the better.”